Saturday, June 13, 2015

Kickstarter and Koji Igarashi and Bloodstained

By temperment, I am calm and even keeled.  I don't get overly enthusiastic or excited by many things.  In many ways I regret that, I feel that I miss out on something by not being more enthusiastic.  But a little more than four weeks ago, I got excited by a video game my sister-in-law saw on Kickstarter, "Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night", being designed by Koji Igarashi.  Koji Igarashi, better known as Iga, spent twenty years at Konami designing video games.  His most well known works are Castlevania games, 2D side-scrolling exploration/action games.
According to an interview Iga gave Polygon last year, several years ago Konami moved him away from 2D Castlevania games to social games.  Iga freely admitted that he was unable to transition from the hardcore games he was good at to the social games for the casual market.  After several of his games were canceled, he quit Konami and decided to start his own company.  He wanted to make a gothic, exploration-focused action platformer in the style of Castlevania.
Iga went from publisher to publisher and was told "No" every time.  He finally found some financial backers but they would only fund him if he could prove there was still interest in his style of game.  Hence, Iga went on Kickstarter campaigning for $500,000 for "Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night".  The campaign was to end June 12th.  My sweetie and I were excited and contributed on the first day.  Apparently, we weren't the only ones because Koji Igarashi reached his goal that first day.
As the campaign progressed, stretch goals kept getting met so new goals were added.  My sweetie and I checked the Kickstarter page several times a day over the four weeks of fundraising, monitoring Bloodstained's progress.  As the amount of pledges kept growing, so did my excitement, so much so that I insisted that we watch final four hours of the campaign streamed live on Twitch!  After $5,000,000 were donated, one last stretch goal was made during the live stream and that goal was more than met by the end of the campaign.  We had so much fun!