So I was going to write something about the Windows Phone 8 leak from a few weeks back (the "Apollo" thing, running on the actual Windows 8 kernel instead of the old CE stuff, NFC, the whole deal) but honestly every time I try to care about Windows Phone my brain just slides off it. Sorry Microsoft. Maybe when it actually ships.
What I cant stop thinking about instead is this Double Fine Kickstarter. If you havent seen it yet: Tim Schafer, the guy behind Grim Fandango and Psychonauts and basically every point-and-click adventure game I loved as a kid, put up a Kickstarter for a brand new old-school adventure game. No publisher. No platform holder telling him it needs multiplayer or a skill tree or whatever. Just him and his studio making the kind of game nobody funds anymore because the genre supposedly "died" a decade ago.
The ask was $400,000. They hit that in something like eight hours. Eight hours! And it hasnt stopped since, its sitting well past two million dollars now with backers still piling on every day I check. I put in $15 myself, mostly out of nostalgia, partly because I wanted the documentary tier where the 2 Player Productions guys film the whole development process. Ive been refreshing the page more than is probably healthy.
Heres the thing that gets me though. This isnt really about the game yet, nobody knows what the game even is. Its a leap of faith based entirely on a guy's reputation and a genre people are homesick for. Publishers spent years telling everyone adventure games dont sell, point-and-click is dead, nobody wants slow deliberate puzzle-solving anymore, and then a few thousand strangers on the internet went "actually we do, here's our credit cards" and proved it in a single afternoon. Thats a pretty loud rebuttal.
Im not going to pretend I fully understand where this goes. Kickstarter has been around for a couple years now doing indie games, art projects, gadgets, that sort of thing, but Ive never seen a game project on there move like this one has. I keep wondering if this is a one-off (famous guy, beloved back catalog, perfect timing) or if this is the crack in the dam and were about to see every studio that ever got told no by a publisher try the same trick. My gut says its mostly the former. Tim Schafer has twenty years of goodwill built up and most developers dont have that. But I could be wrong, and honestly a small part of me hopes I am, because the pitch meeting where some suit explains why your weird idea wont sell 2 million copies day one sounds exhausting and I dont work in games.
Also, and this is a smaller complaint, but the Kickstarter comments section for this project is already a mess. People arguing about stretch goals that dont even exist yet, people demanding the game be on Steam instead of downloadable direct, someone insisting it needs voice acting in Klingon (I am not making that up). Crowdfunding a thousand backers is nice. Crowdfunding forty thousand backers apparently means you also crowdfund forty thousand opinions about what the thing should be, and nobody asked for that part.
Anyway I dont have a neat takeaway here. Im just a guy who grew up playing Full Throttle on a hand-me-down PC in the mid 90s, watching a project like this actually happen and not quite believing it. If this works the way it looks like its going to work, Id bet money we see a wave of these before the year's out. Somebody's going to try to fund a whole studio this way eventually, and thatll be the real test of whether this was a fluke or a new way of doing things.
Going to go check the pledge total again. Probably up another ten grand since I started typing this.