I’m a little premature here, but considering there’s about a half day left before 48 hours have passed I’m going to risk saying that the game will be funded in 2 days total. Where it goes from there, who knows?
The video gaming industry journalism has certainly taken notice of both this and Double Fine’s success. I think my musings on revolutions are not nearly as wild-eyed as they may have sounded a month ago…
Some very big things are changing in the world right now – not all of them for the better – but on the entertainment side, with the video game market still growing, niche markets getting some love is nothing but a good thing!
Here’s a very good read over at Kotaku -
How Wasteland 2 Went From Hopeless to Half a Million in 24 Hours
Brian Fargo had given up. He’d spent the better part of the past decade pitching a game idea to publishers, only to be met by indifference and rejection. While he pitched and tried to sell his game, business executives would stare at their phones, texting. Barely paying attention. It was infuriating.
The idea was for a successor to Wasteland, the 1988 post-apocalyptic roleplaying game that went on to inspire the popular Fallout series. Fargo had notebooks full of design concepts and mechanics for the game, which he says would be an “old school, classic roleplaying experience.” But he couldn’t get it off the ground without finances, and investors just didn’t think it would work.
“It was just shocking to me,” Fargo told me in a phone interview yesterday. “It felt like such an obvious thing to do. There was this audience, this pent-up demand… I just couldn’t get it done.”
Even after the success of Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic Fallout 3 in 2008, Fargo couldn’t convince publishers to roll the dice on his Wasteland sequel. So two years ago, he gave up. It was time to move on.
“Publishers looked at me like I was a dinosaur,” Fargo said.
Then Tim Schafer came along. When the Psychonauts creator launched his Kickstarter for a point-and-click adventure game last month, he showed the world that fans were interested in financially supporting the ideas and creators they love. Schafer was able to bypass traditional publishers, who would likely look at him like a dinosaur too.
Maybe Wasteland 2 could take a similar path. Like Schafer’s project, maybe it could appeal to the fanbase of a genre commonly thought dead.
Read the full article at http://kotaku.com/5892901/how-wasteland-2-went-from-hopeless-to-half-a-million-in-24-hours
Jim Yoho is the owner of In Genre, Wausau Comics, and JAY Entertainment and he maintains the site as well as adding the occasional article or review of his own. He often goes by Merin online, from way back in the BBS days of dial-up modems even.
Having enjoyed writing reviews and postings for other sites he decided to start his own where he combined his creative urges to write and create web comics (such as Episode Fun and Alistair & Arthur) with his long-held desire to bring together and organize talented people for joint projects. The end result is that you get the Wausau Comics site - articles and reviews of genre entertainment at In Genre plus some web comics and links to the works of other Contributors, too! 
