Brathwaite and Hall scrap old-school RPG Kickstarter

Revered industry veterans Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall launching a crowd-funding campaign to make an "old-school RPG" certainly seemed exciting, but they offered very few details on what they planned to make at Loot Drop beyond that it'd be, well, some sort of old-school RPG. Having only raised a quarter of the million dollars they were shooting for with two-thirds of the fundraising time gone, they've conceded that the pitch for Shaker was weak and scrapped the Kickstarter, vowing to return.

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Revered industry veterans Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall launching a crowd-funding campaign to make an "old-school RPG" certainly seemed exciting, but they offered very few details on what they planned to make at Loot Drop beyond that it'd be, well, some sort of old-school RPG. The Kickstarter received a lot of pledges very quickly but then stalled, and has now been scrapped. Their pair conceded that their pitch for Shaker: An Old-School RPG was weak, but vow to return.

The Kickstarter campaign was shooting for a cool million dollars but had only received $247,693 by the time it was closed, with almost two-thirds of the fundraising time gone. After a flurry of pledges following the launch, it soon stalled.

"Ultimately, our pitch just wasn't strong enough to get the traction we felt it needed to thrive. Sure, it may have made it. We could have fought our way to a possibly successful end. In reading your feedback and talking it over internally, however, we decided that it made more sense to kill it and come back with something stronger," Brathwaite and Hall explained in a update post.

"In game design, mercy killing is the law."

However, they do say to "Expect something more soon." Given how well their Kickstarter went with the slimmest of concepts, riding purely on their names and calls to nostalgia, a detailed, thought-out pitch could go gangbusters.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    October 22, 2012 6:45 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Brathwaite and Hall scrap old-school RPG Kickstarter.

    Revered industry veterans Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall launching a crowd-funding campaign to make an "old-school RPG" certainly seemed exciting, but they offered very few details on what they planned to make at Loot Drop beyond that it'd be, well, some sort of old-school RPG. Having only raised a quarter of the million dollars they were shooting for with two-thirds of the fundraising time gone, they've conceded that the pitch for Shaker was weak and scrapped the Kickstarter, vowing to return.

    • reply
      October 22, 2012 6:58 AM

      I think it's good of them to realize it was time to call it quits. It really looks like they rushed their whole campaign forward before it was ready for the public. Hopefully they take this time to get the game further along and get a more fleshed out campaign. It doesn't sound like they are done with this game yet, they just realized they need to approach it a different way. Ideally... if they could mock of some kind of basic demo of the game and how it will look... that would go a huge way. I'm still pulling for this game because I know they can do it and I'm pretty sure I'm going to love it if it's anything like a modern version of Wizardry 8.

    • reply
      October 22, 2012 7:37 AM

      This feeds right into my other posts about Kickstarter. Glad they were honest about the trouble road and how difficult bringing this to market would be. Fingers crossed the other games I've already backed will be successful.

    • reply
      October 22, 2012 9:30 AM

      so.. they finally realized that an OLD SCHOOL RPG doesnt take 1 million to make and are now looking like idiots...

      • reply
        October 22, 2012 11:51 AM

        The pitch was non-existant. They just threw something out there and didn't have any idea what it was supposed to be. Or, more likely, they assumed they had some deep relevance as developers and expected a much larger resposnse, which didn't happen. Ancient glories and all that jazz. Wizardary isn't just old, it's paleolithic and nearly forgotten.

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      October 22, 2012 12:13 PM

      Hang on, they wanted to do an old school RPG with all the frills of BG2, hundreds of side quests, multiple endings, as well as making it in first person with the graphics of today? For a million bucks? I'm not so sure that's possible.

    • reply
      October 22, 2012 12:14 PM

      Hang on, they wanted to do an old school RPG with all the frills of BG2, hundreds of side quests, multiple endings, as well as making it in first person with the graphics of today? For a million bucks? I'm not so sure that would have been possible.

    • reply
      October 22, 2012 1:12 PM

      Good for them. It was an awful pitch and they deserve all the flack they got for it.

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