At least if you didn’t back the original Kickstarter...
Double Fine Adventure! was, of course, one of several over-the-top success tales on Kickstarter in 2012 - one of the million-plus elites. There’s all sorts of backstory that is supposed to go right here in this essay about the studio and its principles and their background in the classic era of point-and-click graphic adventure games. But I don’t actually know much anything about that, it’s an era of gaming I pretty much missed entirely. It’s not what got me interested in it, anyway.
There is an issue of scale and perspective in all this that is fascinating to me. The Kickstarter project started out with a goal of $400,000 which - looking at the sorts of figures Kickstarter projects, especially intellectual property projects (as opposed to vaporware gadget ones) were raising, was ambitious. It raised a (at the time, if I recall correctly, record-breaking or at least top five or something) 3.3 million which is obviously a whole hell of a lot of money to most of us - from 87 thousand backers. This is where it gets interesting to me: 87 thousand is a big number but its nothing much when it comes to video games, where top sellers’ figures start at a million. If you believe Wikipedia, Angry Birds has been downloaded a billion times, which is just stupid (and yes, I’m one of them).
The nature of creators also delights me: rather than embarking heartily upon the $400,000 scale game and rolling around cackling in the spare 2.9 million, these earnest lads and lasses immediately rescale the whole notion of the thing so that they are now attacking a 3.3 million dollar game, which is to say that they’re now grappling with something they couldn't possibly have ever gotten done by the original deadline of October 2012, and which will inevitably cost at least 4 million dollars.
This recipe for instant pathos is fantastic for me, because aside from the eventual game (I will say I retain complete faith that the game will be completed), the other primary product for the project backers is ongoing access to a documentary presentation of the production produced by 2 Player Productions, who have established a deserved reputation for their video-game centric documentaries.
The documentary has been good so far but in my estimation it really hit stride with the most recently released episode, number 8 (“Adventure Games Are Not Dead”). This is sausage factory time, really getting under the hood as the game slams into deadline and financial and personnel crunches and all the blue sky artistic and technical aspirations must be scaled and finessed to fit into the casing. Designers, artists, producers and programmers at a storied independent studio are, not surprisingly, a diverse and articulate bunch of unconventional professionals and it’s engrossing to watch them get it on as the rubber hits the road. It feels to me like 2 Player Productions is also honing their ability to really deliver the sense and feel of game design and creation in progress, walking the fine lines of not getting mired in technical minutiae, and delivering a vivid sense of the game in progress without risking too much spoilage.
Suffice to say if game design is a topic that turns your crank, I’d deem it well worth the $30 admission to become a “slacker backer” and get access to all of the game design documentaries and those to come, as well of the game, of course, by and by. It’s been an education and I remain excited whenever I see a new documentary episode has been released.
