So I've been refreshing a Kickstarter page like fifteen times a day for the last three days and I don't even feel bad about it.
If you haven't seen this yet: Tim Schafer's studio, Double Fine, put up a Kickstarter on Tuesday asking for $400,000 to make a new point-and-click adventure game. Old school. No publisher, no platform holder telling them it needs multiplayer or a season pass or whatever. Just Schafer and a small team making the kind of game that basically died out commercially after the mid-90s, back when LucasArts was cranking out Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango and I was way too young to understand half the jokes in Grim Fandango but played it anyway.
They hit the $400k goal in something like eight hours. Eight hours! By the next day they'd crossed a million dollars. As of this morning it's sitting well north of two million, and it's still climbing every time I check, which is a genuinely bad use of my Saturday but here we are.
I put in fifteen bucks, which gets me a digital copy when it's done (whenever that is, no date yet, and I don't think anyone including Double Fine actually knows). Some backers went in at the $10,000 tier just to have lunch with Schafer, which, sure, if you've got it.
What I keep thinking about is how upside-down this is from how games usually get funded. Normally a studio pitches a publisher, the publisher does market research, somebody decides adventure games "don't sell" (they mostly don't, that part is true, the genre has been commercially dead in the US for over a decade) and the project never happens. Kickstarter just skips that whole conversation and asks the actual people who'd buy the thing whether they want it. Turns out a couple hundred thousand of us do, or at least enough of us with disposable income and nostalgia for Guybrush Threepwood to make the math work in about a day.
I don't think this "solves" game funding or whatever hyperbolic thing people are already saying about it in comment threads. It's one very well-known designer with a built-in fanbase and a lot of press attention because it's novel right now. If some random 22-year-old with no shipped credits put up the same pitch tomorrow I doubt it clears five grand. But it's still kind of wild to watch happen in real time, refresh by refresh.
A tangent, because it's my blog and I can: I was never that into Kickstarter before this. I'd glanced at a couple of design projects, a watch band thing, some card game a friend backed, and mostly thought it was a nice idea for small stuff. This is the first time I've seen it used for something at a scale that makes actual industry people sit up. Whether that's good long-term I genuinely don't know. Putting $2 million in the hands of a studio with zero obligation to a publisher sounds great until you remember that "zero obligation" also means zero of the usual guardrails, budget discipline included. Schafer's a known quantity though, Psychonauts was a critical darling even if it bombed commercially, so I'm not that worried this one turns into vaporware.
Also, unrelated, but Windows Phone 8 stuff started leaking out earlier this month too, codename Apollo apparently, and from what's floating around it sounds like it'll share more of its guts with regular Windows than the current Windows Phone 7.5 does. Not as fun to write about as a couple hundred thousand people funding an adventure game overnight though. I'll probably come back to Apollo once there's more than rumors to go on.
Anyway. If you grew up on those old LucasArts games and you've got fifteen bucks spare, the campaign's still open for another month or so. I have no idea if the final game will be any good. I backed it anyway. Sometimes that's just how it goes.