Thursday, February 9th, was the kind of eye-popping, nail-nibbling day you don’t see too often in the universe of PC gaming. Sure, there are lots of anticipated releases every year, and now and then something truly scintillating (such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) will capture imaginations and headlines. But for continuous, bubbling drama dispensed over a single unremarkable weekday, nothing in a long time has quite matched the thrill of following the already-legendary Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter project.
Launched Wednesday night, it reached its goal of $400,000 before I’d even fired up my computer Thursday morning. But it didn’t stop there. It had hit $600,000 well before noon. I looked once when it was hovering around $800,000, then stepped away from the computer for, say, ten minutes, only to find it shooting past $820,000 when I returned. Someone I know, who was just as astounded as I was at the success, estimated it was averaging $1,000 in new funding every minute for considerable portions of the day. As of Friday at midnight, after just over 24 hours in existence, the project had attracted nearly 31,000 backers and its pledges had exceeded $1.15 million… and there will still 32 days left to go until the funding deadline.
This response may seem astonishing at first, but it doesn’t take too much digging to discover the source of the excitement. Double Fine Productions, the San Francisco–based gaming company founded in 2000 by Tim Schafer (who was responsible for some big adventure gaming hits of yesteryear including Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango), has been building up its street cred in recent years with games like Psychonauts and Costume Quest. Challenging current gamers’ notions of entertainment and often forcing them to think beyond the boundaries of the first-person shooters that have long flooded the market, Double Fine has developed a devoted audience interested in the company’s blend of old-school know-how and contemporary technology.
I would submit, however, that the fren y has a secondary source as well. Double Fine isn’t just proposing that people give them money so they can make the game in isolation before releasing it and moving on; the company wants to involve the backers in the creation process itself. The project promises exclusive monthly video updates in a professionally shot “documentary series” that will encourage “total transparency” with the people putting up the dough for it. An online discussion forum will let backers interact with developers and even vote on crucial game decisions. Naturally, they’ll also have access to both a private beta test and the finished version of the game. And note that these aren’t premiums you get only with exorbitant donations: Anyone ponying up $15 or more gets to be a part of it all.
Unlike the early days of computing, when a group of college kids at MIT or a knowledgeable married couple could found their own entertainment companies, PC gaming is now a much riskier, more imposing, and more monolithic business. There are wonderful companies of all si es to be found, of course, but even they are eclectic collections of talent that often operate within the rubric (or at the very least require the services of) an even bigger distribution house that sees titles as line items rather than individual entities.
No, an avid, informed gamer can’t help with the design: His or her job is to buy, play, and maybe crow or complain about the experience online. But even those making the game have Big People to answer to, and how many landscape-changing ideas are lost every year as a result of that we can only imagine.
With its latest barn-burner idea, Double Fine is making a firm stand against all that, and giving us a glimpse at gaming’s future. It’s loudly refuting the idea that traditional, mass-market adventure games are dead, withered in the heat of newer technology and online play. It’s proving it by getting the money straight from the people who want just that kind of game. Then, with the documentary, it’s giving ordinary people a chance they haven’t realistically had in decades: to watch an artistic creation be built from the ground up, and maybe even have a say in the construction.
People all over the globe get to help create a game that would likely never be made any other way, and experience the whole thing from the inside out. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? And, as if the sundae needed a cherry, the game will catapult past the kind of wary publishers who never would have given it the green light in the first place.
Every bit of it flies in the face of what we thought we knew about how game design, game making, and game promotion works in the 21st century and points to a far more compelling, dynamic, and democratic model for the years to come. When make-or-break power no longer rests solely in the rarefied, manicured hands of play-it-safe money men, the world will change. (We’re already seeing this with ebooks, too.) Whether Double Fine’s gambit, or the final product resulting therefrom, will be objectively successful remains to be seen. But if all that collection of donations buys is a kernel of hope that traditionally faceless programmers, writers, and artists may actually care about their ultimate audience and will get their work seen by those most likely to appreciate it, Schafer, Gilbert, their coworkers, their thousands of fans, and the millions who stand to benefit from this way of thinking will almost certainly find that that money has been very well spent.
Double Fine, Kickstarter, and how 35,000 people can change PC gaming
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