John Romero's Kickstarter cancelled - but for a good reason

John Romero is one of the legendary programmers behind games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and he just announced a crowdfunding campaign for a new game called Blackroom.

Now it has already been cancelled.

The news comes as the project was stumbling slowly towards its fairly modest goal and in response to backer comments. It seems many people, especially PC players, were really interested in seeing a demo before stumping up cash.

“There’s a hitch here, a hitch that’s making us do something that’s right for the game, the team, and the community: we’re pressing “PAUSE” on the fundraising campaign for BLACKROOM to complete this gameplay demo. Simply put, this will take more time than the Kickstarter has left, so we’ve decided to suspend the campaign and launch a new one when the gameplay demo is ready. We believe, however, it is the right choice. We know you do, too. Thanks to your feedback, we know we should have included it at launch.”

It's a pretty reasonable thing to ask for, especially as the Kickstarter video was pretty vague on what you would actually be doing in the game.

There are a lot of elements at play here but one of the biggest is that the campaign wasn't going particularly well and it's far better to cancel yourself then risk a very public failure for a project that's at such an early stage .

Romero has said that it could be two months before the demo is ready, at which point they'll relaunch the campaign with the same goals and rewards. They're also working on some kind of extra loyalty element for those who return to back again.

Stay tuned for more on Blackroom.