THE UNITED EMPIRE of Earth Navy caused quite a stir last November when it announced that it would be putting 200 decommissioned Javelin Destroyers up for sale. Each 1,132-foot-long spaceship has the sort of amenities that your average interstellar mercenary finds hard to resist: four primary thrusters, 12 maneuvering thrusters, a heavily armored bridge, private quarters for a captain and an executive officer, six cargo rooms, general quarters for a minimum of 23 crew members, and a hangar big enough to accommodate a gunship. There's even a lifetime insurance policy.
The document that announced the Javelins' impending sale took pains to stress that these warships were fixer-uppers. “They are battle-hardened and somewhat worse for wear,” it read, “and have been stripped of the weapons systems.” Thus, any would-be buyer would eventually have to shell out extra to equip the 20 gun turrets and the two torpedo launchers. The asking price for each ship: $2,500. And that wasn't some form of fictional futuristic space bucks; it was 2,500 real dollars. Actual, real, present-day American Earth dollars.
Despite those caveats, all 200 Javelins sold out. In less than a minute.
The sale brought in half a million dollars for Cloud Imperium Games, the company behind the space-exploration and combat videogame Star Citizen. Cloud Imperium has hit upon a truly futuristic business model. There's nothing new about inviting players to spend real money for virtual goods—a vehicle or weapon or article of clothing that can only be used inside a virtual gameworld. What's new about Star Citizen is that most of its goods are doubly virtual—they can only be used inside the gameworld, and the gameworld doesn't actually exist yet. In fact, its massively multiplayer universe may not be up and running for several more months. Or several more years. Or … longer.
Star Citizen began as a crowdfunding project in the fall of 2012 and has since raised an astonishing $77 million from some 770,000 backers. That's an order of magnitude more money than the next-biggest crowdfunded videogame project. It's several multiples more than any other crowdfunding project of any kind. It's equivalent to the budget of a top-tier game like Watch Dogs or to Snapchat's Series B funding round. And Star Citizen continues to bring in millions of dollars every month. Yet only a few isolated segments of the game have been released so far, and even those are in a very early, bug-ridden form.
But you can already immerse yourself in the world of the game if you visit the Star Citizen website. Some material is standard-issue get-the-players-hyped language intended to read as if it were written in the year 2015. But a lot of the material on the site—like, say, the sales pitch for the Javelin Destroyer—is addressed to the space-faring peoples of the year 2945. As if it's coming from inside the world of the game.
Chris Roberts, creator of Star Citizen, calls this mode “in-fiction,” and it's a signature element of his new game's appeal for fans who adore the neglected niche of the sci-fi game genre that Star Citizen occupies. And yet for every would-be player who thinks Roberts is the savior of hardcore PC gaming—George Lucas crossed with Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto—there's one who thinks him a charlatan, a 21st-century snake-oil salesman. What's undeniably true is that he's one of the greatest marketers the industry has ever seen.
Beyond that, how does Roberts explain the $77 million secret of Star Citizen's success? “The big thing is the thing that we didn't do,” he says. “Most crowdfunding campaigns engage some people, convince them to become backers, and then the campaign stops. We didn't stop.”
THE ULTIMATE SCIENCE Fiction Game. That's the vision Chris Roberts has been pursuing since he was a teenage movie buff with an aptitude for coding. “I wanted to capture what I felt watching Star Wars as a kid,” he says. “I wanted to be Luke Skywalker in the cockpit of the X-wing fighter.”
In 1990 he pitched this concept to Origin Systems, an Austin, Texas, gamemaker. All Roberts had walking into that meeting was some mock-up sketches and a prototype engine that could depict three-dimensional space battles. That and an irresistible way of describing what was in his mind's eye. He was just 21 at the time, and his apple cheeks and boyish grin made him look even younger. He doesn't have an especially commanding voice—he speaks softly in a narrow register, with a slight British accent that he picked up during a childhood spent in Manchester. But his enthusiasm is infectious, and his sales pitch that day 25 years ago was extremely convincing. “He nailed it,” says Richard Garriott, cofounder of Origin. “Just nailed it. There wasn't a person there who didn't know it would be our best-selling game ever and that Chris would be a rock star.”
Roberts was given all of the resources he needed to make the game, which would be called Wing Commander. It indeed became Origin's biggest seller and spawned a whole “space sim” genre. The game looks dated now, with lo-res graphics and dialog rendered as text—but its nuance and detail was unprecedented. Wing Commander pioneered the perspective that first-person shooter games would later adopt. You saw the world through the eyes of a rookie pilot—the outer-space action, the instruments and buttons in the cockpit, even your avatar's hands on the controls. When your ship got damaged, sparks came out of the dashboard—“very high-end immersion at the time,” as Roberts describes it with a laugh.
Every element of the game was organically integrated; it was all in in-fiction. If you wanted to stop playing, you didn't simply hit a Save button—you clicked on a bunk in the ship's barracks, as if your avatar was turning in for the night. If you died in battle you didn't just see a game-over screen, you watched your own funeral, complete with a 21-laser-gun salute and a eulogy from the captain that described your specific combat experiences. Keep in mind that this was 25 years ago, when gamers were still totally jazzed about the Mario game in the Fred Savage movie The Wizard.
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