So two days ago Double Fine Productions, a fairly large and well known game company decided to try something interesting. They started a Kickstarter page in an effort to fund a new point-and-click adventure they wanted to work on. Now for those of you that don’t know, two of the greats in the era of point-and-click adventures work at Double Fine, Tim Schafer of Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and Psychonauts fame, and Ron Gilbert of Manian Mansion, Zac McKraken, Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, and Deathspank fame.
Double Fine’s Kickstarter page started with the seemingly astronomical funding goal of $400,000, but with such heavy talent on board they shattered that amount in mere hours. As of right now with 32 days left they are sitting at $1,098,594. While all of this is awesome for Double Fine, I think it might actually be a bigger boon to all of the smaller creators who are attempting to fund first time or long awaited projects through Kickstarter.
When I first heard about Kickstarter years ago I thought it was a great idea, but I never really went beyond that. I have now started digging through a number of gaming projects and I am amazed at all of the small time companies with big ideas that are now able to get their products out to the wider world now. There are card games such as Skittykitts which the creator says he created just to have some fun with friends and now he has enough money to create nice boxed copies.
There are a wide range of table top projects waiting to be funded, which vary from The Tomb of Kochun, a custom Pathfinder module just looking for funding to pay an artist, to Lions of the North, a from the ground up brand new RPG looking to fund everything. Kickstarter is an awesome way to find and help new games out there and you get the benefit of knowing you helped a new project off the ground.
If you have a few bones to spare, I suggest you head over to the games page of Kickstarter and see if there is anything worthy of your hard earned cash.
