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Kickstarter Funds Over $3 Million For Adventure Game

November 15, 2012 by A.S. Van Dorston

In Ernest Cline’s brilliant novel Ready Player One, published in June, the protagonist Wade Watts, using his avatar Parzival in the virtual reality environment OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) to play 80s video games like Pac Man and Defender, and adventure games like Zork in order to win the competition to find an Easter egg. The grand prize is unimaginable riches, especially in a post-apocalyptic future world where people are starving, and the homeless Watts hides out in an abandoned van in a junkyard while he attends school via the OASIS environment in the small amount of time he’s not competing for the grand prize.

I wouldn’t have gotten too far. While I reached a middling level of competency on Asteroids and Dig Dug, video games were not my jam. Quarters were wasted at the arcade on any other game as I got killed in quick succession. What I really loved was adventure games, especially the Infocom text adventures like Zork, Planetfall and an adaptation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I could get away with playing during free periods at school as unsuspecting teachers only saw text on the screen. Like the Wade character, I relied on the gear provided by the public schools (Apple IIe’s for most of my time in high school), and couldn’t afford even the slightly older home computers, which in my day were the TRS-80, Commodore 64 and Atari 800.

The long-suffering adventure game genre hasn’t been doing too well the past 15 years. Despite his success with popular point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island and Full Throttle at Lucas Arts, Tim Schafer had to fight to get his masterpiece Grim Fandango  funded, completed and published in 1998. Despite winning multiple awards for what was often regarded as the greatest adventure game of all time, sales of Grim Fandango weren’t brisk enough to satisfy the suits, and he went on to work in other game formats and genres including Psychonauts (2005), Brütal Legend (2009), and Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster (2011). Despite founding his own company, Double Fine, he has needed backing from other companies to fund development for games, and no one was willing to invest in another adventure game. But if Ernest Cline’s book is of any indication, Schafer isn’t the only person who still has a passion for video games. He decided to try out Kickstarter to fund a proper follow-up to Grim Fandango, and ended up hitting the jackpot nearly at the level of the grand prize in Ready Player One.

To say Schafer has a strong adventure gamer following is an understatement. Not knowing the full potential, he picked a very modest amount for a goal, $400,000, which would be barely enough to scrape together a very streamlined effort. He reached that goal in March 2012 within 9 hours! The money kept rolling in, and by the time the deadline arrived, nearly $3.5 million dollars was donated. Schafer promised he and his company Double Fine would increase the scope and production values accordingly and make good use of the money. I’m not surprised by the success. The art, humor and cleverness in his games are unparalleled, particularly with Grim Fandango, which was pretty much the masterpiece of the genre. If Double Fine Adventure is even half as good, I’m in! I’m already in as a “slacker backer,” for $15 I get a download of the beta version when it’s ready, and the final product along with a download of the accompanying documentary. Today is the last day you can get all that for $15, as it will double to $30 starting on November 16th.

I don’t own any gaming consoles, as I haven’t found new games alluring enough to spend my limited time on. But you can bet that once this game is completed, my posts on this site will get a little scarce for a couple weeks!

http://www.doublefine.com/

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