People were raising money to develop video games on Kickstarter before March 2012, but it wasn’t until Tim Schafer’s Double Fine asked for some cash to develop a new adventure game that the crowd-funding website became a house hold name in the game’s industry. Tim Schafer wanted to make a new point-and-click adventure in the trademark style of his early years with LucasArts, making games like Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. The Double Fine Adventure, as it was known at the time, raised $1 million in its first day on Kickstarter, and closed with more than $3.3 million. It’s been a long, patient year for those backers that so eagerly parted with their cash. The wait is almost over. Double Fine announced Broken Age, the true name of Schafer’s new adventure, at PAX East.
“Broken Age is a point-and-click adventure telling the stories of a young boy and girl leading parallel lives,” reads Double Fine’s description of the game, “The girl has been chosen by he village to be sacrificed to a terrible monster-but she decides to fight back. Meanwhile, a boy on a spaceship living a solitary life under the care of a motherly computer, but he wants to break free to lead adventures and do good work.”
Schafer has a history of making spectacular games about young people trying to change their lot in life. Psychonauts, Schafer’s cultish-ly adored platformer for the original Xbox, PC, and PlayStation 2 and Double Fine’s very first game, is about a boy who runs away from his family’s circus to become a psychic secret agent (and attend a fun summer camp).
Double Fine is taking pre-orders for the game, and those that plunk down $30 for a Linux, PC, or Mac version of the game will also get access to many of the same perks that Kickstarter backers got during the 2012 campaign. These perks include access to a private web forum as well as episodes of 2-Player Productions’ documentary about the making of the game.
Broken Age will also mark Double Fine’s turn away from the big consoles of Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Schafer intimated in December that Double Fine may stick to PC and mobile platforms only in the future. Technically, the game will be available for one home console: OUYA. OUYA’s Julie Uhrman and Double Fine announced at DICE in February that the adventure game would be an OUYA console exclusive. Strangely, though, the OUYA is mentioned nowhere on Broken Age’s website.
