Jordan Weisman’s new BattleTech Kickstarter raised more than $250,000 in under an hour.
Originally released in 1984, BattleTech was, for many gamers, their first introduction to the wide and wonderful world of giant robots blowing stuff up. Influential as the game was however, the franchise and its MechWarrior offshoots have fallen somewhat to the wayside in recent years. While MechWarrior Online has provided some relief for the mecha-inclined, it’s been years since fans of the franchise have received anything even resembling the deep and addictive solo experiences that originally defined it. Thanks to a KickStarter launched by BattleTech creator Jordan Weisman however, that may soon no longer be the case.
Launched yesterday, Weisman’s campaign was aimed at raising 250,000 dollars to fund the creation of a new PC-centric BattleTech game. Response from fans was intense and immediate. The campaign reached its goal in a mere 53 minutes and, in the hours since, has continued to raise money hand over first. At the time of this story’s publication it had already climbed past the 900,000 mark with more than 13,300 backers.
The game itself will be “a single-player, turn-based, tactical ‘Mech combat game.” Weisman and his team intend to use their Kickstarter funds to create a full-fledged story campaign in addition to an already funded skirmish mode. If the campaign can reach a 1.85 million dollars stretch goal, they will also add in side contracts and procedurally generated missions. A final 2.5 million dollar stretch goal will also unlock a PVP multiplayer mode “in the famous arenas of Solaris VII.” The game will be built with Unity 5 and developed by Harebrained Schemes.
Normally, we’d say something along the lines of “time will have to tell if it makes it that far.” In this case however, we’d be surprised if it didn’t raise that much. In the 25 minutes it took to write the rough draft of this news story, the campaign’s funding climbed another 15,000 dollars. Granted, the influx of backers might eventually taper off, but we somehow get the feeling that that won’t be happening anytime soon.
Source: Kickstarter
