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Monday, February 20, 2012

Kickstarter: Double Fine Adventure





For those who are unfamiliar with Kickstarter, here's how Wikipedia defines it:

Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding website for creative projects. Kickstarter has crowdfunded a diverse array of endeavors,[1]ranging from indie film and music to journalismsolar energy technology and food-related projects.[2]

Basically, this means that you, or anyone, can create a project on Kickstarter, and hope that everyday people from around the world will "back" up the project's development. The idea is that small amounts from a large "crowd" can generate sufficient funding, thus reducing the dependency on traditional investors (VC, banks...). Backers are usually compensated with the first production samples, a limited edition item or a behind the scenes look at development. Kickstarter takes 5% of projects that reach their fund raising goals (projects that don't reach their goal receive no money) and Amazon Payments takes an additional 3-5%.


One of the biggest (if not, the biggest) projects is Double Fine Adventure. Back in the early 90's, I had the luxury of playing the old school "point-and-click" PC games. I was still in elementary school but loved the funny plot lines and cool animations of games like "The Day of the Tentacle" and "Sam & Max Hit the Road". I don't know of any current games that use this type platform anymore (maybe Leisure Suit Larry but that was a while ago), but clicking random things was fun.  

Day of the Tentacle:

Sam & Max Hit the Road


Tim Schafer, the project lead for The Day of the Tentacle is using Kickstarter to finance the revival of the genre in the form of Double Fine Adventures. His goal was to raise $400,000, which he accomplished in 8 hours! At the time of this posting, there is still 22 days left and over 60k backers contributed over $2M, a resounding success.

I'm really excited to see how Double Fine Adventure turns out and I hope the genre is as good as I remember.

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