Kickstarter Games - A Digital Resurrection

[HiddenX]

Andrea Contato continues his series about the history of video games. A Kickstarter for the English translation has been started:

Andrea Contato:

Hi again!

I'm the author of Through the Moongate: The Story of Richard Garriott, Origin Systems Inc., and Ultima and Video Games: The People, games, and companies.
I want to inform you that I just launched a Kickstarter to fund the translation and publishing of my 2 new books:

Video Game Stage 2: From 1980 until 1984 (the second book in the series, about the general history of video games: mainframe, console, arcades, computer, and handheld)

The Sumerian Game a Digital Resurrection (a book about one of the earliest computer games, a strategy and management educational project made in New York in 1964).

The second book, The Sumerian Game: A Digital Resurrection, is the result of extensive research: there are many chapters where you can find information about the history of the game and how it influenced following games until the mid-80s (after all, the Sumerian Game is like the grand Father of today's strategy, business, and simulation turn-based games), how it was designed, how it was programmed and who developed it, with extensive biographies, lots of pictures from newspaper, documents and much much more, including the slides that were shown during the gameplay (some journalist called them the first cutscene in video-game history). To complete the work there's a long chapter with my study of the game: diagrams, tables, and text extracted from the printouts. With this documentation, everyone can rebuild (TWO KNOWN VERSIONS of) the Sumerian Game with the desired language.
BTW I released the game for free on Steam.

Recently, the also New York Times mentioned my research.

In the second book of the series Video Games you can also find extensive research about early CRPGs like Akalabeth, Ultima, PLATO CRPG games and Wizardry.

More information.

 

[Couchpotato]

Meh the golden Age of Kickstarter and crowdfunding is over. Don't get me wrong it's still happening, but the larger more famous developers don't use it anymore.

Getting funded nowadays is a lot harder then eight years ago as well.

Anyway off topic but it's sounds like a good book to read.

 

[HiddenX]

The Kickstarter already reached the 5.000 Euro goal.

 

[Couchpotato]

His goal wasn't that high, so of course he got funded.

 

[Stingray]

Meh the golden Age of Kickstarter and crowdfunding is over. Don't get me wrong it's still happening, but the larger more famous developers don't use it anymore.

Getting funded nowadays is a lot harder then eight years ago as well.

Anyway off topic but it's sounds like a good book to read.

This Kickstarter is for a book translation, not a game. And the book is about early 80s games on top of it, so there's no connection whatsoever to Kickstarter'ed games.

 

[Couchpotato]

Someone can't read I said my reply was off topic.

Also the title of the news thread was clickbait as well. Sounded like someone praising Kickstarter and crowdfunding as the future. Hence I gave the wrong opinion.

Moving on now won't be replying again.

 

[Stingray]

Someone can't read I said my reply was off topic.

There's a big difference between being off-topic, and posting something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Was kinda obvious you hadn't even read the post. But yeah the title on this post is also quite deceptive and should probably be fixed.

 

[Carnifex]

I'll read it for sure.

 

[bjon045]

There's a big difference between being off-topic, and posting something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Was kinda obvious you hadn't even read the post. But yeah the title on this post is also quite deceptive and should probably be fixed.

I'm struggling to see how it is off-topic to talk about the platform that is involved in this particular kickstarter. It is quite a common belief that the golden age for Kickstarter is over, even for non-gaming endeavours. Board games have largely moved to Gamefound. Most retro hardware projects just stick with indiegogo (i've backed 2 in the last month). Gaming kickstarters are largely shovelware.

The platform just got greedy, plain and simple.

 

[Redglyph]

They look like books I may want to read some day. EDIT: Has anyone read Stage 1 in English, or even the original ones already published in Italian?

Regarding the crowdfunding of video games, I was trying to see the success rates on different platforms, but it's hard to interpret.

For example, Kickstarter has seen some fluctuations in the success rate of games. The average is 50% today, but that category includes board games among other non-video games, and board games seem usually very successful. If I use the 'video games' filter, I get about a 4th of the game projects, but it's not accurate and doesn't give the respective success rate anyway.

It's a global average since the start of the platform, but we can see that it has increased significantly these last few years, since it was 40% in early 2020.

 

[Lucky Day]

Interesting.

The Sumerian Game is FTP on Steam

The Sumerian Game on Steam

A game of strategy and management. The Sumerian Game is one of the earliest computer games. Developed and programmed between 1963 and 1965, it was designed to teach children math, economy and ancient history. The source code was lost but now you can play it again.

store.steampowered.com

Recently I read another history book on Sumer (it read like an entertaining college essay and was free) and it pointed out that the Sumerians needed imported labor to handle the seasonal harvest, most notably the Akkadians who would eventually overthrow the Sumerians.