What makes a project like this succeed so spectacularly on kickstarter? Is it because the video is so well done? Or because Tim Schafer is behind it? Or because a lot of people want to play an adventure game? Or the perfect storm of all of the above? Just trying to wrap my brain around it.
I woke my pregnant wife up 10 minutes ago to tell her that I'm sending Kickstarter $15 to back a project because they are the ones who made the games we played together years ago and will make the same type of game with the money. She almost danced to the news. We live in some city you never heard of, in Turkey.
Tim Shafer has had great critical but not commercial success in recent years. Double Fine is a legit company that has shipped games both large and small. In fact they've shipped 5 smallish titles in the past 2 years so you know they can do this one. There is a huge nostalgia factor as many people, such as myself, grew up on Tim Shafer adventure games in the early 90s.
On top of that this is an old school adventure game being made by Tim Shafer and Ron Gilbert - the two people who INVENTED the genre. It's a perfect storm of success.
Thats the reason to be a backer and i hope they will produce something that is able to bring back memories. I spent so much time in my youth with games made by them.
I just remembered how i was sitting in my room in front of my Amiga 500 and 12 floppy disks to play Monkey Island 2 - good times !
No surprise really; no publisher will support an adventure game. If it's not an FPS/Action/Sports game no one will touch it. It's the reason Schafer started doing "indie" games in the first place.
The giant spotlight that Notch (Minecraft) brought to the project and to Tim via the Psychonauts 2 funding "offer" helped a lot too. Must admit, I'd never heard of Tim's name before despite being familiar with his games until Notch was going on about it.
Scare quotes are tricky :-) But they indicate something "does not signify its literal or conventional meaning" and while Notch mentioned it and they might be talking, I didn't see an "offer" per se, hence my quotes (but admittedly I was thinking of "offer" from a contractual point of view at the time).
