Apple II Bits

Hot on the heels of Juiced.GS‘s March cover story on Kickstarter, Apple II franchises are crawling out of the woodwork to seek crowdfunded revivals. Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert will be delivering a Maniac Mansion-style adventure game in October 2012, while exactly a year later, Brian Fargo will publish a sequel to the role-playing game Wasteland. What’s next?

It’s a return to the land of the lounge lizards with Leisure Suit Larry, the sexy, seedy adventure games featuring pickup artist Larry Laffer and his quest to become better acquainted with the opposite gender. The series was a contemporary of adventure games Space Quest, King’s Quest, and Police Quest and featured the point-and-click interface endemic of Sierra Online titles.

Franchise creator Al Lowe is asking for a cool half-mil to apply a graphical overhaul to the original 1987 game, add voice acting, and port it to "XBLA, PSN, Android, iPads, iPhones, Windows Phones, Kindle, Linux and of course, Mac!"

The best part of Lowe’s pitch is the video that prominently features an Apple II, both in the opening shot and around three minutes in:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leisuresuitlarry/make-leisure-suit-larry-come-again

In addition to the aforementioned features, I’m hopeful that, like the recent special edition of The Secret of Monkey Island, we’ll be able to switch between the original and updated graphics on the fly. We’ll find out upon the remake’s release this October.

(Retrogamers may also be interested in backing an original Shadowrun game)

(Hat tip to Kay Savetz; consultation by Steve Weyhrich)

Earlier this month, Tim Shafer and Ron Gilbert, the team behind the sequel to the Apple II classic Maniac Mansion, ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to create an original adventure game. That they raised $3.3 million on a requested $400,000 is mind-boggling. That’s like selling 87,142 tickets to "a Steven Spielberg movie" before the plot, genre, actors, length, or rating have been published or even decided.

Inspired by this success, Brian Fargo, formerly of Interplay and now of inXile Entertainment, promised to launch his own Kickstarter campaign to create a PC sequel to the Apple II game Wasteland, which already has its own spiritual successor with the Fallout series. True to his word, the same day Schafer closed his project, Fargo launched his. And like Schafer, Fargo’s video offers a humorous demonstration of the challenges faced by retro game designers in the modern publishing environment.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2

Success was swift: within two days, Fargo met his $800,000 goal. At the time of this writing and with 25 days to go, the project has earned $1,493,522; just $6,478 more, and the development team will add Mac and Linux editions.

But why stop there when you could get even more money? As Schafer discovered, Kickstarter processes pledges via Amazon Payments, which may not be very friendly to international customers or those without credit cards. inXile has created an elegant solution: now that the project has met its goal and pledges are guaranteed to be converted to charges, customers can skip the grace period and hand over their money directly via PayPal.

Just $15 will get you your copy, with additional exclusive rewards all the way up to $10,000. I haven’t forked over my money yet, and it’s a bit frustrating to do so when there are plenty of indie developers on Kickstarter trying to make a career like the one Fargo already has behind him. Still, how can we not support furthering the Apple II’s legacy? Kickstarter offers a reminder feature that will send you an email 48 hours before the project’s closure, so if you’re unsure, you have time to think it over. Chances are I’ll find a spare $15 necessary to guarantee my copy of Wasteland 2 when it ships in October 2013.

UPDATE (Mar 22): Fargo has created the "Kicking It Forward" campaign, in which developers promise to put 5% of profits from their successful Kickstarter projects toward other people’s Kickstarter projects. How cool is that?

I spent this past Halloween playing and blogging about Organ Trail, The Men Who Wear Many Hats’ zombie-themed rendition of the classic Apple II edutainment title, MECC’s Oregon Trail. Now that modern update is going the Kickstarter route to get funded for Mac, PC, iOS, and Android ports. Check out the trailer (contains one swear word near the end):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hatsproductions/organ-trail-directors-cut

The campaign even comes with its own fake backstory, which includes an unfortunate and gratuitous slam:

Originally developed many years ago as a teaching tool for students, schools across America used the game to prepare children for the impending zombie apocalypse, and dysentery. But what the public doesn’t know is that the released version does not follow the program director’s original design. Before they tried to have him killed, he stole all the code and it has taken him 40 years to program the game in his own vision. Unfortunately no one uses the Apple-II anymore, so he’s putting it on those newfangled phones.

In addition to the ports, the game will also include new features, such as a day/night cycle, the ability to converse with NPC survivors, as well as a new soundtrack.

The project ends after thirty days on Thursday, January 19, at 1:20 PM EST, but by the time I discovered it on Facebook, it already had 91 backers and $4,417 of the requested $3,000.

I’ve nonetheless pledged $20, though what they’ll do with these excess funds, I’m unsure; their promise of "If we reach $5k, we will add an Android and iPad version of the game to the preorder options" seems a sure bet. So I offer this challenge — and incentive: I will multiply my donation 12.5-fold if The Men Who Wear Many Hats offer a reward of an Apple II version of their game. Their fundraising video states that they’re making Organ Trail to look like an Apple II game. Why not go the extra step and port it?

Jason Scott isn’t the only Kickstarter user showing up on Apple II users’ radars. Another project, one designed to fund a recurrence and propagation of a glitch-based conference held last year in Chicago, has a tangential connection to the Apple II.

An integral component of Kickstarter are the incentives that projects offer their backers — a physical reward or honored acknowledgement of each person’s financial support. For the Glitch project, Melissa Barron — KansasFest alumna, exhibit hall award recipient, and Juiced.GS contributor — has donated two of her famous glitch weavings, produced on a Jacquard loom. For the same price you paid for your Apple-1, you can support the cause and receive your own tapestry. Only two were originally offered, with one already spoken for at the time of this posting, so get yours today! The project ends the evening of Tuesday, September 27.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/glitch/glitc-h-20111ditdoit2gather

(Hat tip to Daniel Kruszyna)

It seems you can’t turn around these days without bumping into Jason Scott. Because putting Apple II magazines into the Internet Archive, donating documentaries to Apple II users, or compiling collections of Apple II crack screens isn’t enough to keep a guy busy, he’s decided to tackle his greatest project yet.

Having produced both BBS: The Documentary and GET LAMP in the last five years, Scott now wants to more than double his filmography. His goal is to publish not one, not two, but THREE more documentaries in the next four years — one each about the 6502 processor, tape as a medium, and arcades as places. The 6502 documentary should be of particular interest to Apple II users, since it was on that chip that Woz based our favorite machine.

Scott’s last Kickstarter project set out to raise $25,000 with which to complete GET LAMP, which he had mostly already filmed. This time, Scott wants $100,000 to pursue three films simultaneously. I found the project less than a day after its debut, at which point he had already raised $12,000. By the end of the first day, he’d broken the $30,000 mark. Will the project maintain the momentum enough to cross the Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing threshold by the November 12 deadline?

It’s easy to imagine not contributing to that inertia: commercial products should be financially solvent, funding themselves through their own sales. But for niche topics like this, especially those that are independently produced and don’t have big-time backers, the truth is that these films won’t exist unless fans like us support them. So I’ve tossed him a few dollars (as a belated birthday gift — Scott turned 41 this past Tuesday) as a deposit toward these films, at least two of which interest me. There is little variety to the affordable funding options, but you can donate any value you want — the tiers are only for the rewards. So pick a sum that fits your budget and help Scott meet his.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/textfiles/the-jason-scott-documentary-three-pack

Many computing publications have risen and fell with the computers they covered, their shining moments squelched and historical literature lost. But every now and then, one gets a second chance at live. This week, it’s Historically Brewed, published 1993–1997 by David Greelish, host of the Retro Computing Roundtable podcast.

David’s goal is ambitious: he wants to take the nine roughly annual issues that were published in HB‘s lifetime and reproduce them not in their original format, but as a paperback book. The final product, including David’s computer-related autobiography, will be 195 pages, with "a detailed listing of contents [coming] soon.&quot.

It’s an uncommon approach to revisiting a defunct hardcopy publication. The more popular alternative has been to scan or otherwise recreate the original issues digitally, as Mike Maginnis has done with Computist, Mike Harvey with his Nibble CD-ROMs, and, more recently, Dale Goodfellow and Simon Williams with 300 Baud. But I can empathize with David’s love for print, seeing as how it’s the same motivation that has kept Juiced.GS from going all-digital.

To accomplish his goal, David is using Kickstarter, a crowdsourcing alternative to fundraising that has been successfully used by other retrocomputing enthusiasts, such as Jason Scott and 8 Bit Weapon. David’s fundraising page features a video that showcases some of the issues, where you can see some familiar bylines, such as Steve Weyhrich.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dgreelish/bring-a-great-computer-history-zine-back-to-a-new

The self-published book will have an ISBN, meaning it will be obtainable (if not necessarily stocked) by major retailers such as Barnes & Noble. However, some distribution issues remain to be resolved, so the best way to guarantee your copy is by buying it directly from the publisher, done by pledging $25 or more. For $100, you’ll even get a page dedicated to you in the book!

After just a few days, David has already reached more than half of his modest goal of $1,200. Pledges will continue to be accepted until August 15, meaning you can preorder the book even after the minimum fundraising goal is met.