Tuesday, July 07, 2015

Siboot

Chris Crawford has a Kickstarter for Siboot that ends in two hours and has less than half of the $50,000 it was attempting to raise.

The Kickstarter is fascinating, because this new game is based on the Storytron engine, which was in development for what--two decades?

Crawford's last released game (Patton Strikes Back: The Battle of the Bulge) was released in 1991. So why should we care now?

I may not be able to construct an entirely logical answer to the question, but I do care. I want to see what this eccentric genius (and I think that's a fair description) has been doing with his time for the last two decades.

I don't even think it will be a fraction of what he'd hoped for, because his dreams seem far beyond his grasp, but there's something vaguely noble about plugging away for what constitutes forever.

The good news is that Crawford has said even if the Kickstarter fails (it will), the game will still get released. And while I don't think the game will succeed, I do think it could be a very important failure.

In many ways, important failures--ones that spur innovation from other developers--are far more relevant to the timeline of gaming development than unimportant successes.

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