Christian Allen on Kickstarter

Extracted 19MAR2012 from http://tinyurl.com/7vlmy9n

Allen wants to make a shooter. An old-school tactical shooter (first person or third) like he used to develop at Red Storm. A game like the old Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon... This is what it would feel like to play his game, as he described it to me in San Francisco last week:

"The biggest thing is tension. You've been given a scenario. It's non-linear. You've made decisions on where to go, where to place your guys, getting ready to go in. You don't know what's in there. A real [hostage rescue] team doesn't always know where everything is. There's only a few enemies, but you don't know where they are. If they get the drop on you, they're going to kill you. There is an element of reflex to it, but a lot of it is just proper planning and observation and figuring out your situation. But even if you do everything right, it doesn't mean you are going to succeed. "

And what happened when he pitched his tactical shooter to publishers? Mind you, he was one of the top designers on Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Halo Reach.

The pitch hasn't gone so well. "It's like pitching a flight sim," Allen says. And the publishers rattle off the excuses: "'It's a super-vocal audience.' 'They don't buy a lot of games.' 'They buy one game a year.' 'Console gamers are too impatient; they won't play this kind of game.' Console gamers literally are too dumb to play this kind of game.'

...He's at $33,000 now from nearly 800 backers, many of them old-school fans of games like Rainbow Six and SWAT 4.... A week ago, he was at $20,000... There are 18 days to go on Christian Allen's Kickstarter. He just needs to hit 200K to make an Alpha, to convince publishers that people want this.