Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding website, used to fund a wide range of creative endeavours, and it’s the endeavours of Double Fine Productions that are big news today.
If any of you are unfamiliar with Double Fine Productions, they are a small games company making big noise. Double Fine have been around since 2000, you may have sampled their work in a few titles like, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend or Stacking. Double Fine founder Tim Schafer, Former disciple of Ron Gilbert at LucasArts. has often talked of making an old school point and click adventure game like the original Monkey Island games, Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. but in the current state of gaming no company would fund, but the fans cried out for it. Schafer decided to start a Kickstarter campaign asking for $400,000 to make the game and a have a camera crew document the whole thing.
Within hours of starting the campaign there goals was surpassed and over 1 million smashing the records and any expectations anyone had for this project. with just hours to go as of this writing they now have over $2.8 million, over seven times their original goal.
This is an amazing achievement, and sets a great precedent that great things can be funded by creators. In fact Kickstarter has reported a huge increase in funding for other video game related projects as a results of Double Fine’s success. I for one can’t wait to see what kinda game they can create now with this budget and the future of large scale independent games, or other media projects.
