Apocalypse Now RPG Campaign Moving From Kickstarter
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With less than 10 days left in its Kickstarter campaign, Apocalypse Now RPG called for evac. Having gathered only about $170,000 of the required $900,000, it was clear that the project wouldn't get funded. Instead of cutting their losses, the team behind the project decided to double down and move the crowdfunding campaign to a dedicated platform of their own:
Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope and the team of game industry veterans developing the Apocalypse Now videogame adaptation have moved the project from Kickstarter to a dedicated platform at ApocalypseNow.com. The new platform will serve as a rallying point for the community and represents the team’s long-term commitment to both funding the project and sharing details of the development process.
ApocalypseNow.com will be an engaging space where fans and backers can get the latest updates, communicate with the team making the game and continue to support the project through the entirety of the game’s development cycle. The team will rely on this dialogue with the community to help them to create an Apocalypse Now game worthy of the motion picture in every way.
“We are making a unique interactive experience with the Apocalypse Now videogame -- it’s like Fallout: New Vegas on acid in Vietnam,” said game director Montgomery Markland. "The Apocalypse Now team plans to raise $5 million to produce an authentic game that the people want to play."
Through the new platform, the team making the game have created a long-term plan for the community to guide and influence the progress of Apocalypse Now. The development team will be able to entertain and engage with fans, and provide continuous entertainment culminating in the videogame release. The community will start receiving rewards shortly after successful funding and regularly over time.
Important to note, the current backers are eligible for a pledge tier upgrade. You can find an FAQ on how to get it in the latest update on Kickstarter.
And if you want to know more about the troubled history of this project even before it appeared on Kickstarter, you can check out this article on The Verge:
In late January, an exciting and unlikely project showed up on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter: a request for $900,000 to make a video game adaptation of Apocalypse Now, officially blessed by the film’s director Francis Ford Coppola. The page described the game as a survival-horror adventure with a sophisticated branching narrative, allowing players to create their own storyline for protagonist Benjamin Willard — whether that meant single-mindedly pursuing the rogue special forces agent Colonel Kurtz or sitting on a boat dropping acid. “I’ve been watching video games grow into a meaningful way to tell stories,” said Coppola in a statement, “and I’m excited to explore the possibilities for Apocalypse Now for a new platform and a new generation.”
Today, three weeks after launch, Apocalypse Now studio Erebus LLC effectively ended the underperforming Kickstarter campaign. While the campaign may officially stay open, Erebus is moving fundraising efforts to its website, seeking $5 million. The hope, according to the site, is to give Erebus complete independence from traditional video game publishers. The team leads think this will avoid problems that helped doom the project a decade ago, at a small and short-lived studio called Killspace. But former Killspace employees contend that the problems ran deeper than Apocalypse Now’s developers admit.
Killspace was launched in 2009 by two Erebus co-founders, Montgomery Markland and Larry Liberty. The roughly 40-person Los Angeles studio kept a low profile, and it completed only one game over its three-year lifespan: Yar’s Revenge, a little-known Atari remake that was released in 2011. As Markland describes it, Killspace was a casualty of the Great Recession, a small company damned by its reliance on foundering giants like Atari, which filed for bankruptcy in 2013.
To former employees, though, the picture is more complicated. After the Kickstarter launch of Apocalypse Now in January, The Verge talked to half a dozen former Killspace developers, two of whom say they were directly involved with the original Apocalypse Now project. Employees — who spoke on condition of anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements — complained of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages, erratic and out-of-touch management, and financial decisions that made an already bad situation worse. One person called Killspace “the worst-run company you could possibly imagine.” Another simply referred to their time there as a “nightmare.” And all of them expressed serious misgivings about the crowdfunded Apocalypse Now.
