It's like the old saying goes: You only get one chance to make a first impression. And if you need some solid proof of that fact, you need look no further than the seemingly doomed Shadow of the Eternals. After a questionable first run at crowd-funding the game, the developers regrouped, got their act together and returned to ask for some up-front cash. Would-be fans weren't having it, though, as the game's second Kickstarter campaign only raised half of its pledge goal.
First, a little history lesson for you. The Nintendo GameCube was, let's face it, mostly a crap system. A brilliant game would occasionally pop up on the console, though, and one such game was a little survival horror title by the name of Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requium. In the game, players explored a haunted house and traveled through time to play as various individuals who had come in contact with a particularly nasty artifact. We're talking touched by the elder gods here. What made the game especially amazing was a sanity system that, as the character's grip on reality started to fail, more and more crazy stuff would happen within the game world.
Flash forward to the 2013 and a little game called Shadow of the Eternals gets introduced to the world. Billed as the spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness, Shadow of the Eternals eventually made its way to Kickstarter looking to earn some up-front funding.
A couple of things hindered the campaign's success, though. For starters, the developers at Precursor Games came directly from Silicon Knights, which was in a spot of financial bother. It was unclear if the former Silicon Knights crew were still tied to their old company and, quite frankly, whether or not the Kickstarter campaign was simply being utilized to pay off old debts.
There was also the fact that Precursor started a second crowd-funding campaign running in tangent with the Kickstarter campaign, all of which was being done with little transparency.
Precursor eventually pulled the plug on both campaigns, though, and promised to come back bigger and better than ever. They made good on that promise, returning to Kickstarter on July 25 with all of the previous kinks ironed out. They had a full plan in place, attached actors like David Hayter to the project, outlined the development process, a timeline, supporter involvement and reward tiers. In other words, their new Kickstarter campaign is what folks were hoping to see in the first place.
All of that initial confusion seems to have been too great for would-be supporters to overlook, however, as the second Kickstarter campaign has now drawn to a close, woefully shy of its $750,000 goal. With 5,932 backers, the game only pulled together $323,950 by the time the clock hit zero.
Whether or not this spells total doom and gloom for Shadow of the Eternals remains to be seen. Precursor might choose to take another swing at it sometime down the line, or they may have put together a solid enough package to draw in publisher funding. As for now, though, it looks like Shadow of the Eternals will have to remain in those shadows.
