The Kickstarter Manifest

Ladies and gentlemen. I hereby name 2012 as the year when shit got real. Thanks to Kickstarter, a simple idea like fund-raising made website, we are now entering a new era in videogames and soon, I believe, creative arts development.

Thanks to Kickstarter, gamers now have real power of choice. The only choice we had before this was what games to buy. Now, we have the power to choose which games are to be born at all. It's become a habit in recent years for software houses to put their money where they're sure to have a huge comeback ever since gaming became trendy, sometimes ignoring genres and their fans or just getting lazy in their results, living on ancestral fan-bases which ultimately had to face the truth too.

Now, though, we have power. From this year onward, as long as there's talent, an idea and people willing to work on it, there will be the possibility for us to support them, to make them stand and deliver what both gamers and developers want. Once again, creativity becomes king.

Remember, remember, 2012. Screw the Mayans and any other doomsday prophecy. I will survive, keep on living and playing, for from now on, we have power. And that power is called Internet.

Come hither, gamer. It's time to be a backer.

Meinos Kaen

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the fenomena that has been rocking my and lots of other people's worlds in the last few weeks: the Kickstarter fenomena. Today, I want to give you information, awareness, a window upon what's happened, what's happening and what I can't wait to see.

Kickstarter, formerly known as KickStartr, and my tongue is thankful for the change, is a website founded in 2008 which is, going by Wikipedia definition, a 'crowd funding website for creative projects'. In other words, if you've got an idea, if you've got a project or a vision but you lack the money, you can share it with the world through the website: anyone interested in seeing it become reality can fund its realization in a few easy steps.

The site has been around for almost four years, as I stated, but it has gained its biggest boost in notoriety in the last few weeks, thanks to a few projects that have garnered lots of backing which equals lots of money which nowadays equals lots of attention. The first was The Elevation Dock by Casey Hopkins, which answered the inner prayer of every owner of an iPhone in the world: a dock which you can connect your phone to without having to shake the mother-quaker like a maraca to disconnect it later. The funding goal was of 75,000 $. The final result was of 1,464,706 $, almost twenty times as much. This was the first sign, which I missed, not being an iPhone owner. I'm more of a Blackberry guy.

The Kickstarter Fenomena was first brought to my attention by this article from Cracked.Com, which brings to light the project that tugged at my heart-strings. You may or may not know Tim Schafer. For those who don't, he's one of the heads who brought to life classics like the two first Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle and sole head behind Grim Fandango, Full Throttles, Psychonauts and Brutal Legend. After departing from LucasArts in 2000, he founded his own software house called Double Fine Production, and for years fans had been asking for a new a game from the roots, an old-school adventure game. There was a little problem though: no publisher would consider the idea. And thus, they turned to Kickstarter, with a goal of 400,000 $. Result: the project reached its intended amount in eight hours, and concluded with a stunning amount of 3,336,371 $, with all the extra money going into extra features for the game. As Cracked.Com eloquently put it: 'No suits. No corporations. Just pure, unbridled freedom to make whatever they want. That is the power of the Internet, harnessed by people who understand how to fucking use it.'

I couldn't agree more, and a lot of people share my opinion if three other more than successful projects are any indications. One of my favourite webcomics, The Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew started a Reprint Drive on Kickstarter to bring back into production out of print books of the comic, with a goal of 57,750 $, which turned into a total amount of 1,254,120 $ by its end. And going back to videogames, we have: 1. Shadowrun Returns, where fans are helping Jordan Weisman in making a new game that truly incarnates the spirit of PnP RPG Shadowrun, sorely needed after the latest product with the Shadowrun name, a first-person shooter; 2. And Wasteland 2, a sequel to the progenitor of the first two Fallout, developed by the same father, Brian Fargo, who is also the person to who we currently own the initiative that will make so that this will not just be a momentum, but something destined to last.

Brian Fargo has launched the initiative Kicking It Forward, which significance comes from it's simplicity: all the projects joining the initiative pledge to donate 5% of their profits back to the Kickstarter community, thus ensuring its survival and continued expansion. This was the proverbial drop, which really started a fire in me, as you read summed up above, and that you can read right here as well, turned into JPEG.

I don't think I have to add anything else. If you'd like, save this JPEG. Post it somewhere, anywhere else. Read it to someone else. Do whatever you want with it. My message is now on the World Wide Web, and I can't wait to see what else will Kickstarter and the power of the internet bring. I'm confident and again, I say: it's time to be a backer.

Meinos Kaen out!