Double Fine Raises Over Half a Million on Kickstarter for Adventure Game Project

Before Psychonauts, Tim Schafer was busy making the world a better place through point-and-click adventure games, a genre that has thinned out as the video game industry has continued. You may have heard of some of his finest work: The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango. His best work is Psychonauts, though, a platformer-adventure hybrid, and just the other day, the creator of Minecraft, Notch, said he’d fund the development of a sequel. Aside from being in the middle of “lovely talks” with Notch about funding the sequel to one of the best video games ever made, Double Fine put up a fundraiser on Kickstarter with a goal of $400,000 in order to help fund a new adventure game. Seeing as how Tim Schafer is a legendary adventure game maker, the $400,000 goal was reached in about eight hours after the fundraiser was published. At the moment of this writing, the pledged funds are at $583,571 and climbing every time the refresh button is hit.

In a hilarious video explaining the fundraising project, Schafer explains that they couldn’t pitch an adventure game to publishers because the genre is seen as dead — something that would be quite difficult to argue with publishers because, hey, when was the last time you bought a retail point-and-click adventure game for your Xbox 360?

On top of the world getting a new adventure game from person who was literally the best at making them, the project will also see 2 Player Productions make a documentary about the entire process. 2 Player Productions, if you’re unfamiliar, is the team that is making the Notch documentary, as well as the team that did season one of the Penny Arcade show.

Double Fine is offering some pretty awesome incentives to give them your money, from a $15 pledge getting you the game on Steam, access to the beta, and the documentary, to a $10,000 pledge netting you lunch with Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, to a $150,000 pledge getting you one of the last four Day of the Tentacle triangle boxes.

The fundraising has already went well beyond the $400,000 goal, and that extra money will be put into the game and documentary.

(via Kickstarter)

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