So I backed a video game this week. Not preordered, backed, like, gave money to a company before they'd made anything, on the promise that they'd actually make it. Feels weird typing that out. Feels weirder that I don't feel weird about it.
Tim Schafer's studio, Double Fine, put up a Kickstarter last Wednesday (Feb 8th) asking for $400,000 to make a new point-and-click adventure game, the kind of thing nobody's funded a big publisher for since roughly the Clinton administration. Grim Fandango. Day of the Tentacle. That whole LucasArts era I grew up on with a mouse in one hand and a strategy guide open on my desk because I was 11 and had no idea what a "verb coin" was supposed to do.
They hit the $400k goal in under eight hours. Eight hours. By the next morning they'd cleared a million dollars, which as far as I can tell is the fastest any Kickstarter project has ever hit seven figures. I checked the page again this morning and the number's still climbing, no sign of slowing down, and the campaign doesn't even close until mid-March.
I put in fifteen bucks, which gets me the finished game plus a documentary about how it got made, which honestly might be the part I'm more excited about. Watching a bunch of people who've spent a decade making games nobody at the big publishers wanted to fund anymore just build the thing, with cameras rolling the whole time. Two Player Productions is doing the doc and I've liked their stuff before.
What gets me isn't really the money, it's what the money means. Every pitch meeting I've ever read about for an adventure game in the last five years ends the same way: publisher says the genre's dead, nobody wants text-heavy puzzle games anymore, everyone wants the next Call of Duty. Fine, maybe that's true if you need a $60 million budget to break even. But it turns out there are apparently tens of thousands of people, last I looked the backer count was somewhere past twenty thousand, who'd rather put fifteen or thirty bucks toward something a publisher wouldn't touch than spend it on whatever's coming out of EA that quarter. Nobody had to convince a suit in a boardroom of anything. You just ask the actual audience.
I don't think this fixes everything about how games get made, and I'm a little wary of the takes already floating around calling this the future of the whole industry. It's one very beloved studio with a very specific, nostalgic pitch, and I doubt every project gets this kind of response. Most Kickstarters, gaming or otherwise, still don't make their goal at all. But watching the number tick up in real time on a Wednesday afternoon was genuinely one of the more fun things I've done on the internet this month, and that includes the three hours I lost last weekend trying to figure out if my old Netscape bookmarks file was recoverable off a dead hard drive. It wasn't. RIP.
Separately, and this is barely related except that it's also this week's tech news, there's a leaked video going around of what's supposedly Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo. Joe Belfiore walking through it, talking about it running on the actual Windows 8 kernel instead of the old CE stuff, NFC support, more screen resolutions than before. Rumored for late this year. I don't own a Windows Phone and probably won't get one, but I'll admit the idea of a phone OS that shares real guts with the desktop OS instead of being some watered-down cousin is at least interesting, even if Microsoft's track record on phones the last few years has been pretty rough.
Anyway. Fifteen dollars, one documentary, one adventure game I probably won't get to play until next year at the earliest. Worth it already just for the number going up.