People Rushing To Give Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars In Just Hours For Brand New Adventure Game

from the monkey-island! dept

Whoa. After dinner, I did a quick look around the web to see if anything interesting was going on, and saw someone mention that the Double Fine Adventure project on Kickstarter had raised over $100,000 in just a few hours. I clicked to open the page, but then went off to do some other things, take my dog for a walk, tuck my son into sleep, chat with my wife, etc. Then I came back to my computer, and someone else mentioned that it had now raised over $200,000. And as I write this, it's getting mighty close to $300,000. Who knows where it'll be by the time you read this. Either way, the basic story is that popular game development shop Double Fine wants to create a new point-and-click adventure game, but says that no publisher will pay for such a thing (even though they have Ron Gilbert -- the creator of the original Monkey Island games on staff).

So they decided to go to Kickstarter. And, as a part of that project, they're also planning to create a documentary film about the making of the game... using the same filmmaking team, 2 Player Productions, who have also been working on a documentary about video game maker Notch (who you hopefully know already). But they wanted to raise $400,000. $300,000 for the game, and $100,000 for the documentary. That's still a significant chunk to raise over Kickstarter... but clearly the public thinks it's worth it. You should check out the awesome video that Tim Schafer, Double Fine's boss, put together, embedded here: The video is quite awesome.

Separately, Double Fine wanted to offer some super premium tiers which were simply too rich for Kickstarter to handle, so they had to post them to their own website. These include the following:

Pledge $15,000 or more:
Dinner with Tim Schafer and key members of the dev team.

Pledge $20,000 or more:
Dinner and BOWLING with Tim Schafer and key members of the dev team.

Pledge $30,000 or more:
Picture of Ron Gilbert smiling.

Pledge $35,000 or more:
Undoctored picture of Ron Gilbert smiling.

Pledge $50,000 or more:
Become an actual character in the game.

Pledge $150,000 or more:
Tim Schafer (that’s me) will give last four remaining Triangle Boxed Day of the Tentacles, in original shrink-wrap.” (Limit of 1) (Holy crap, what am I thinking? I only have four of those!)

There are plenty of interesting things to discuss about all of this, but one of the key points is that this shows how content creators sometimes can read a market much better than the traditional gatekeepers. Double Fine knows that no publisher would give them money for this game because the "experts" at those publishers (gatekeepers) don't think there's a real market for them. But there clearly is, and it's all coming out thanks to the Kickstarter campaign, and this massive rush to fund the game.

I also find this amusing, coming just hours after someone was telling me on Twitter that Kickstarter was no way to fund serious development, because people just aren't willing to pay for creating new things. It appears that plenty of people disagree. Anyway, we've embedded the pledge widget below, because at the rate people are pledging, I'm sure the numbers we talk about above are likely to be out of date pretty quickly, and it seems likely that this game will far surpass its $400k goal. I'm just wondering if Ron Gilbert will ever actually smile.

Filed Under: adventure games, business models, funding, gatekeepers, video games
Companies: double fine, kickstarter