Brian Fargo calls publisher pitches "absurd"
The inXile CEO talks about the moment when he knew he had to take things into his own hands
The classic role-playing game Planescape: Torment revolved around the philosophical conundrum, "What can change the nature of a man?" inXile posed a different question for the sequel Torment: Tides of Numenera, introducing a Kickstarter campaign to get it off the ground by asking, "What can change the nature of a game?"
Whatever answer inXile sought, what's going to ultimately change the nature of this game is how it shattered its Kickstarter goal in the first day. inXile asked for $900,000. The Kickstarter became the fastest to raise $1 million, doing so in just over seven hours. Within a few days it had raised $2 million.
Even with inXile's first success on Kickstarter with Wasteland 2, another classic RPG the studio is now reprising, studio founder Brian Fargo claims he didn't see the quick outcome of this one coming.
"We never dreamed about beating the Kickstarter record," Fargo said. "The stars really lined up for this one."
The truth might be that a sequel under Fargo and inXile's stewardship was inevitable. Fargo was at Interplay when it published Black Isle's original Planescape: Torment, a critically lauded game and considered one of the deepest story-driven RPGs ever made. He calls it one of the games he's most proud of from his time at Interplay. It also appears that Fargo had pitched it to publishers in the past based on a humorous skit in his Kickstarter video, a sequence that clearly shows the developer has some disdain for the publisher pitch process. After two resoundingly successful crowd funding campaigns, however, Fargo now hints that his days of pitching publishers might be over.
"It really got absurd at the end when we would have publishers come to us with a specific idea they wanted created. We would spend months working with their producer to basically communicate their vision with concept art etc. only to have their own idea shot down in committee. That was when I knew it was time to take matters into my own hands," said Fargo.