5 Of The Most Controversial Kickstarter Games
Tales from the depths of the crowd-funding underworld.
In the age of the internet, we rarely do anything by ourselves. We share intimate details of our everyday lives on social media, stream our single-player video games, and even when you think you’re alone, Alexa’s always listening. So, it would make sense that video game development would move into the public sphere.
With the advent of Kickstarter, that’s exactly what happened. Fans were able to bring any project to life just by working together and opening their wallets. Developers are no longer on their own in their finances; they have a whole population’s worth of credit cards to funnel into their vision, any vision, which in all likelihood will probably fail. A Kickstarter project can be controversial for a number of reasons, from development cock-ups to successful but strange releases. Let’s dive into some of the top ones.
5. Night Trap ReVamped
If you ever want to cause a stir on Kickstarter, there’s no better way than to take a look at what has been historically controversial and just remake that. Night Trap is an FMV game that sparked a media firestorm of controversy on its 1992 Sega CD launch. The game saw players watching over barely-dressed teenage girls as they spent the night in a dangerous house – you can see where this is going.
In actual fact, after everything our eyes have been subjected to over the last 27 years, the original title is incredibly tame. So, when Night Trap ReVamped entered the scene with an ambiguous PlayStation and Xbox release and a meagre $330,000 goal, excitement at a cult classic quickly turned to confusion. Add technically impossible console releases, bullshit defences from the development team being regularly called out by fellow devs, and handing out executive producer roles to the highest bidders, and you’ve got yourself a head-scratcher.
When Kotaku’s Nathan Grayson attempted to purge some answers to these questions from Tom Zito, the conversation took a bizarre turn. It’s an extremely interesting interview, with Grayson giving Zito more and more opportunities to explain some of the strange decisions of his studio and the producer’s responses becoming more and more defensive. The studio was crucified for the way it handled concerns around its odd setup and the Kickstarter itself only scraped together about 12% of its original goal.
4. MYTHIC: The Story of Gods and Men
The fall of MYTHIC: The Story of Gods and Men shows that however successful your crowdfunding campaign may be, crowdsourced internet operatives will always sniff out your dirty secrets. The action RPG appeared on Kickstarter in 2012, promising a gameplay experience on par with World of Warcraft and the graphics of Skyrim (remember, it was 2012 – Skyrim’s graphics were still amazing). The developers themselves claimed to be of ex-Blizzard fame, with some lofty friends at “Disney/Pixar” (make your mind up lads) to help them out in the motion capture department.
The game had it all: art assets, dodgy t-shirts, and the promise of a life-sized sword If you stumped up a grand. The problem was, none of it was theirs. When the Kickstarter campaign went dead at just £3,739 raised of its £63,00 goal, the forums started stirring. Users found that the art assets used by the devs didn’t belong to them, the sword images were straight up stolen, and the developers themselves, Little Monster Productions, were nowhere to be found.
The con artists then tried to redeem themselves, sincerely stating that “the game itself is well in progress and is NOT a scam of any kind.” Well, doesn’t that just put your mind at ease?
3. Agony
Agony is one of the most controversial games to toe the line on Steam. Its original Kickstarter campaign began in 2017, and was quickly fuelled with double its goal. Boasting “the most terrifying vision of hell in the history of gaming,” it had some enticing screenshots attached, and the promise of the “ultimate trip into the madness of horror.”
It wasn’t so much the eye-melting violence or grotesque imagery that caused a stir on release, it was more the fact that it’s just straight-up an awful game to play. No-one can say Madmind Studios held back on the gore; Agony is thrillingly disgusting. Body parts are strewn across every level, with the dying groans of impaled victims filling a world painted red. If that wasn’t enough controversy, Agony’s laborious gameplay and failure to deliver on even a 10th of what their screenshots had promised in the way of graphical fidelity was what had people clicking away. Repetitive missions, easily avoidable threats, and a collection of strange mechanics that aren’t really ever explained meant that Agony held its own in the spot of worst video game of the year for many outlets.
2. Subverse
Subverse has blown up on Kickstarter over the last few weeks. The sci-fi sex game takes Mass Effect and adds a triple-X spin as players are promised a space RPG like no other. “Take command of your own ship, recruit a bunch of hotties to your crew and then take down an evil empire,” its marketing material reads, “Engage your dicks – it’s time to fap.”
Interestingly, the industry has embraced the sexual content of Subverse, praising it as a step in the right direction for mature video game experiences. Most eyebrows have been raised not by your scantily-clad crew mates but rather by the sheer volume of backers. Subverse has hauled in over $2 million with nearly 60,000 backers unzipping their jeans as we speak.
The team behind the game are well known for their seedy, violent porn films featuring well-known video game characters, but they’re keen to explain that everything within Subverse will be entirely consensual – that’s nice of them. It’s true, if they wanted to put the player in the middle of one of their earlier titles, Kickstarter would have certainly booted the game off the site faster than a backer reaching for the tissues.
1. Yogventures
In 2012, Yogscast took a look at the open sandbox worlds they had built a digital empire inhabiting and grew hungry for a piece of the pie. The result was 13,647 fans left half a million dollars out of pocket, a ruined marriage, and an impressive vanishing act to the sum of $150,000.
Yogventures was pitched as an open-world game featuring the Internet personalities themselves as protagonists. Ok, fine – if that’s what your audience wants, go for it.
It was being developed by Winterkewl Games – great, we know Yogscast aren’t game designers – outsource all you like.
This was Winterkewl’s first game. Hmm, well, everyone’s got to start somewhere.
The game’s going to feature crafting, a complex physics engine, heavy customisation, and randomly generated worlds. Okay, that might be a bit much for them.
Players can tell the developers which features they want and they’ll all be put into the game. Right.
Yogventures was canned in 2014, after Winterkewl shut down, founder Kris Vale’s marriage broke down, and large sums of money had been lost to flighty developers and passed around until little remained. Yogscast ducked refunds by offering backers an entirely different game their mates had made instead and scratched their heads at where they had left the $150,000 they had been given by the studio to create physical backer rewards. The ugly public disputes between Winterkewl and Yogscast ensured nobody really forgot about the disaster for a long time, and to this day the project is one of the biggest examples of the need to tread carefully around Kickstarter projects.
It’s difficult to picture the person who gave Yogscast $2,000 for a copy of an open-world sandbox and a thank you video, or the lone backer who forked out $10,000 to have their name in the end credits of a defunct game, but it’s easy to see how the world of Kickstarter encourages an all-or-nothing approach to game development. As devs need more cash, they promise more for higher backers, as they promise more, they need to develop more, and to develop more they need more cash. It’s no wonder so many projects fail or come out the other end of the factory completely unrecognisable.