Double Fine Want to Fund Next Game Through Kickstarter [Updated]

Update: Double Fine surpassed their 400,000 dollar goal within a few hours, and now the total funds raised are well over one million dollars. It is the second Kickstarter to ever reach the one million dollar milestone. Pledges can still be made until the March 13 deadline, so the final figures will not be known until then.

Original Article:

Double Fine, the developers behind Psychonauts, Brütal Legend and a deluge of downloadable titles, want to have their next game funded through Kickstarter, a service for the crowd sourced funding of creative projects.

Details on what the next game will be are sparse but it is said to be “a brand-new, downloadable ‘point-and-click’ graphic adventure game for the modern age.”

“What if there are a lot of adventure game fans out there who want an adventure game? I wonder if there is some way I can talk to them directly. Cut out publishers altogether,” ponders Tim Schafer, head of Double Fine, in the project video.

The Kickstarter service is the solution to this and the problem of game publishers having “significant strings attached that can pull the game in the wrong directions or even cancel its production altogether," says Double Fine's Kickstarter page.

“Crowd-sourced fundraising sites like Kickstarter have been an incredible boon to the independent development community.” In addition to allowing the consumer to fund exactly what they want, it will “give the developers the freedom to experiment, take risks, and design without anyone else compromising their vision.”

Beyond just the development of the game, the Kickstarter will also fund a documentary team, 2 Player Productions (no relation), to document the process of making it. The video updates will be monthly over the planned six to eight month development time.

The reward tiers for funding range from pledging 15 dollars and receiving the game to 10,000 dollars for lunch with Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, who worked with Schafer on adventure games during the early 90s at Lucasflim Games. There are also special tiers mentioned on Double Fine’s Action News, which range from 20,000 dollars to go bowling with Tim Schafer, to 35,000 dollars for a real picture of Ron Gilbert smiling, to 150,000 dollars for Schafer’s personal collection of four boxed and sealed copies of the original Day of the Tentacle.

Double Fine have until March 13 to hit their goal of 400,000 dollars.