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Games

Kickstarter Campaign Goes Nuts, Raises $50k Per Hour, Breaks Record

Double Fine Production’s new video game will lift the lid on the development process.

Kickstarter has become a financing force to be reckoned with over the past few years. It landed with aplomb at Sundance this year, getting a record number of its crowd-financed films into the highly selective festival, and now another record appears to have been broken. Kickstarter employees were getting pretty excited on Twitter late last night over the incredible rate money was being thrown at Double Fine Production’s new point-and-click adventure game, Double Fine Adventure. It’s going to be created in the style of classics like Day of the Tentacle (1993) and the Monkey Island series.

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The campaign started innocently enough with Fred Benenson, a data engineer at Kickstarter, tweeting enthusiasm for the project:

This is tremendously awesome. Tim Schafer (creator of Grim Fandango, etc.) is using Kickstarter to fund his next game: kickstarter.com/projects/66710…

— fred benenson  (@fredbenenson) February 9, 2012

But in addition to the obvious prestige of Schafer and his development team and the booming nostalgic market for old school point-and-click adventure games, part of the excitement for this game seems to stem from the way the studio is making it. The big gaming studios don’t tend to reveal their trade secrets and when a new blockbuster title is unleashed on the world, the methods behind its production are a mystery for those who are not in the industry—sometimes teased out in interviews or articles about the developers, but always under the watchful eye of the publishers.

Double Fine Productions are taking a more open-house approach, happy to trounce on convention by taking the unprecedented steps of not only being the first major studio to use Kickstarter to fully finance a game, but also create it in the public eye, too.

The video from the campaign

How? Well 2 Player Productions will be documenting the creative process, releasing monthly video updates exclusively to the backers, showing “a game grow from start to finish, with all the passion, humor, and heartbreak that happens along the way. Double Fine is committed to total transparency with this project, ensuring it is one of the most honest depictions of game development ever conceived.” They’ll also be setting up a private online community so backers can give feedback, do testing and even vote on decisions. In this respect, not only is the funding a collaborative, crowdsourced effort but the making of the game is, to a certain extent.

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Sketches of the characters

One of the reasons people use Kickstarter is because they can develop a project without The Man pushing and pulling them along, or canceling it at the very last. So the reasons Double Fine Productions have used Kickstarter are twofold—to stay independent and make the game they want to make, and to honestly show the public what goes on behind the scenes sans all the marketing hype and bull-crud. It’s giving Double FIne the ability to pull back the curtain and deliver not just a game but an education to those who helped fund it.

A unique business model that seems to have taken favor with the public, proven in the speed at which the funding target was met. The target was $400,000 in 34 days, but a few hours after Double Fine Adventure was launched Benenson tweeted the below:

The Tim Schafer / Double Fine project has passed $100,000 in less than two hours of launching: kickstarter.com/projects/66710…

— fred benenson  (@fredbenenson) February 9, 2012

One hour later…

… Double Fine Adventure just passed $200k. That’s more than $50,000 pledged per hour.

— fred benenson  (@fredbenenson) February 9, 2012

Here’s one from co-founder of Kickstarter Charles Adler, just to confirm shit was going down:

There is some epic action going on with this @kickstarter project at the moment: kck.st/A9k3jH #games

— Charles Adler (@cadler) February 9, 2012

So there you have it, a total of $616,463 has been raised so far from 14,939 backers, beating the goal of $400,000 by some way, all happening in a number of hours. What project can claim to raise such a vast amount on such an hourly quota? Big business (and small) will no doubt be taking note.