Brathwaite and Hall kill off Old-School Kickstarter

Industry veterans Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall have halted their Kickstarter campaign for an "old school RPG" after admitting that their pitch for the project wasn't strong enough. The two Loot Drop designers managed to reach nearly a quarter of their $1 million minimum pledge goal in two weeks from more than 7,500 backers, thanks to plenty of press attention and their history working on games modeled after classic RPGs, like Brathwaite's Wizardry 8 and Hall's Anachronox. But the campaign also received a lot of criticitism for providing very few details on the proposed PC game initially. Though Hall and Brathwaite updated the Kickstarter page to provide more information on Shaker: An Old-School RPG, they eventually decided the pitch wasn't strong enough to get the traction they needed. "Sure, it may have made [the pledge goal]. We could have fought our way to a possibly successful end. In reading your feedback and talking it over internally, however, we decided that it made more sense to kill it and come back with something stronger," the pair explained in a statement shared with backers. Speaking with Gamasutra about their proposed collaboration weeks ago, Brathwaite and Hall were excited by the opportunity to crowdfund a title that would have been difficult to find a publisher for, and by the chance to return to their roots after working primarily on social games at Loot Drop. But the designers now say that canceling the project is for the best: "In game design, mercy killing is the law. ... Not every idea flies. We've learned a lot from this effort, and we'll keep making games." Several other veteran developers have found success funding classically-inspired RPG projects on Kickstarter in the past, such as Obsidian Entertainment, which raised nearly $4 million for Project Eternity, more than any other game project on the platform.