03 January 2013

Congratulations to the "Elite: Dangerous" team

Great news from the world of gaming! Elite: Dangerous has met its Kickstarter funding target of £1.25m and will now be going ahead.

I like computer games but haven't really played any on a regular basis since Privateer 2 in 1997, because of lack of time - I don't really have enough time to do all the bits and pieces I want to do in any case, and computer games are a huge time-sink. But when the game in question is a follow-up to Acornsoft's Elite - one of the greatest games of all time, and certainly the greatest 1980s home computer game - I make a very big exception.

Elite: Dangerous is being developed by Frontier Developments whose CEO David Braben was one-half of the team behind the original Elite, and I'm going to be very excited to see what the finished product looks like. The projected launch date of spring 2014 looks ambitious, but to be honest, I wouldn't be that bothered if it doesn't come out until (say) 2017; the important thing is to produce an all-time classic. Certainly the various videos on the Kickstarter site explaining how various features of the game will work look way cool and if they can deliver on this, I can't see how it can be anything other than a mind-blower.

Kickstarter is providing a platform for crowd-funding of some very interesting products at the moment, and I'd certainly recommend that you take a look over there and see some of the things they're coming up with.

No comments: