Eleven years ago today, Cloud Imperium Games launched a campaign to fund a new spaceship game created by Chris Roberts on the Kickstarter platform. The campaign ran from 18 October to 19 November 2012 and raised $2,134,374 from 34,397 backers, smashing the goal of $500,000.
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| Still up on Kickstarter |
That statement CIG raised enough money "to ensure the project will happen!" seems quaint now, but 11 years ago $6 million was a heck of a lot of money. And the stretch goals continued until CIG reached the $65 million goal on 25 November 2014.
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| Kickstarter starter packages |
The Star Citizen wiki points out that today is not the beginning of public crowdfunding efforts. The first campaign on CIG's website began on 10 October 2012 along with a kickoff presentation at GDC in 2012 (full video here). But given the CIG website crashed, I tend to think of the Kickstarter campaign as the original beginning of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 funding.
I really can't blame the original backers who were just dreaming of playing Wing Commander or Freelancer again. The pitch video back then was really enticing.
Perhaps thankfully I had never heard of Chris Roberts, Wing Commander, or Freelancer in the autumn of 2012. After looking into the project, I wasn't surprised that most, if not all, of the Kickstarter package timing was not met. Perhaps in a couple of days we will hear about a preliminary launch date for Squadron 42 at CitizenCon 2023. But I thought I'd finally get around to documenting the beginning of one of the most controversial games of the last decade.
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