Apocalypse Now Campaign Updates, $850,990 and Counting
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So, then this new method of funding video games arose. Crowdfunding. Through my company Malibu Road Pictures, I was fortunate enough to be producer on Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera, which are two of the most successful video game crowdfunding projects in history, and I worked with Brian Fargo, from inXile, on those.
Larry, meanwhile, shipped DC Universe Online, which is one of the largest, most successful licensed MMOs ever – and it was free to play, I think it had 20 million users. Larry’s career is very storied and goes back a quarter century, all the way to the Nintendo 64 and maybe the PlayStation 1. He shipped a game for just about every console for the past 25 years, since before I could drive. And so, he’s got a really interesting set of games that he’s worked on over the years, including one of the best Tony Hawk’s — Tony Hawk 4 — The Witcher, the Sacred Series, DC Universe Online, Fallout: New Vegas, Aliens, Neverwinter Nights, et cetera.
So, I work with inXile for several years on Wasteland 2 and Torment — primarily on Wasteland 2 — and then started this process approximately 18 months ago of really kicking Apocalypse Now off as a project. We had been discussing it for years with America Zoetrope, because when everybody else pitched a shooter, we said, “No, it’s not a shooter, it’s a horror role-playing game.” Because if you look at the movie, the protagonist only fires his weapons twice. He only kills a few people in the movie. It’s clearly not a movie about smashing a button faster than the AI and running 50 miles an hour with an M16.
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And I think by 2019 and 2020 that’ll be even more true, especially with VR and better streaming technologies and full-screen video capture becoming more and more advanced, and hard drives getting larger, hard drives become solid state drives so video capture and high resolution becomes easier for every single player. I think, in the full realization of this game, millions of people will play it, but millions of people will watch it be played by those millions of people.
Like I said, returning to the oral storytelling tradition of The Iliad and The Odyssey, 3000 years ago, but in reverse. That’s the most exciting part to me. And a lot of this is kind of high-falutin’, and as a guy from Texas sometimes I like to boil it down to just brass tacks: It’s a first-person survival-horror role-playing game like STALKER, like Fallout: New Vegas, like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, like Hitman: Blood Money, and you’re going to create a character that travels through a world, you’re going to navigate that world in an exploratory way, and make choices about how you deal with the obstacles and the conflicts and the secondary objectives that are the choices you want to make, rather than the choices the game designers want you to make.
I want you to play the game however you want to play it, and I want people to break the game. Not even kidding. Right? A lot of game designers would be horrified at that, but I want you to go out there and find the edges of the game, and break it, push it to the boundaries, push it to the limits, and see where you can take it. Because where hundreds of thousands or millions of people can take it is going to be a lot farther and a lot wilder and a lot more interesting of a ride than where just we can take it.
