In January, it was announced that Francise Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now would be adapted into a video game, and a Kickstarter campaign was launched to fund development. Now, the campaign is drawing to a close and donations haven’t come close to meeting the pledge goal, so the project’s organizers are trying a different strategy.
Yesterday, it was announced that the campaign will move from Kickstarter to a dedicated independent site, according to a report from VG247. Anyone that already pledged money will be able to upgrade their reward tier for free, simply by proving that they donated via Kickstarter.
The new site will apparently be a community hub for backers, as well as a means of collecting pledges. At present, this amounts to embedded content feeds from Reddit and Instagram, but the team’s announcement post indicates that it will soon play host to community events and livestreams featuring development staff.
Extra pledge tiers have already been added to the project’s new homepage. The highest tier now requires a donation of $1 million, and yields rewards including a 10-day safari in Central America, a unique prop from the set of Apocalypse Now, and the opportunity to spend a month embedded among the development team.
The project’s overall funding goal has now been set at $5.9 million, and pledges will be accepted for the next 459 days. The Kickstarter campaign only accumulated $172,929 over the course of three weeks, so it remains to be seen whether this change of approach will help amass the money required.
A video game version of Apocalypse Now is certainly an ambitious project, and could either turn out very nicely or very poorly. The team behind the game seems dedicated to making the idea a reality, but at present it seems that there aren’t enough backers out there to meet the lofty funding goals.
