Double Fine

The surely made history early this year when they reached over $3M on Kickstarter to fund their Double Fine adventure… and now they’re proposing a rather interesting approach to game-creation by opening their internal prototyping process to the masses…

Amnesia Fortnight is how Double Fine call their annual prototyping period, and just a couple of days ago the team decided that this year’s edition would be internetized… and partner with Humble Bundle to allow readers to vote for a “potential” full development.

For this edition they’ve posted 23 games that could be developed into prototypes. The only problem is that no-one assures any voter (or funder if you want to grab those early 2 prototypes + the top 4 ideas) the most-voted games will ever be produced & released.

Still, most readers will appreciate the peek inside Double Fine’s annual open-hack-day-equivalent… with games, and learn how some of those crazy ideas come to fruition. Some great proposals are already being favored like LeBreton’s “Spacebase DF-9” or Brandon Dillon’s Hack n’ Slash but there’s still 5+ days to vote… so up to you!

When we interviewed Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler just over a year ago they were already the big elephant in the crowdfunding on-line space. Figures and stats wouldn’t stop growing and projects such as Tik Tok had already raised over half a million $$$ at that time.

Well, yesterday I realized that the number of people in the KS office had more than doubled in a year and then read via ATD that 2 projects had surpassed the $1Million barrier, “the iPhone dock Apple should have manufactured” and an adventure game by gaming studio Double Fine. Who needs investors when you have KS?!

The first, “Elevation Dock” has just 1 day to finish its pledge of £75K, but Casey Hopkins stopped worrying long ago. He now has over $1,2million to fully launch one of the many iPhone accessories that have been funded via KS. The difference about this project is that it doesn’t add a feature to the Apple phone, but solves one of the biggest problems Apple has with its proprietary pin connector: undocking its flagship device.

The second project has more than a month to go, and already has nearly $1,4Million. For what? For an “Adventure game” by some of the biggest game gurus in the industry: Tim Schafer & Ron Gilbert, along with the rest of the crew @ Double Fine.

Both a signature that crowdfunding (and maybe in particular KS) is not only here to stay, but a solid funding alternative to traditional production & funding techniques.

Double Fine Amnesia Fortnight 2012

Kickstarter starts competing with VCs