Cyan, the creators of genre-defining puzzle adventure games Myst (1993) and Riven (1997), are only a week away from the end of their latest campaign, a new VR puzzler called Firmament. With still over $400,000 to go, the company is now asking backers to tell friends about the project in an ostensible race to the finish.
As an ‘all or nothing’ campaign, the project will only come to fruition if it reaches the $1,285,000 mark. At the time of this writing, it’s garnered over $860,000, or a little over two-thirds of the way there.
In a bid to breathe new life into the campaign, the studio released an update to the Firmament Kickstarter recently asking backers to contact friends to get the campaign to the finish line:
Today we reached 10,000 backers, and we’re more than 60% funded. That’s 10,000 fans supporting Firmament and affirming that this type of game is important. We love making these worlds, with their meticulous integration of story, environments, and puzzles. And we know that there is a subset of gamers (like you) that love these worlds that we make. That’s what motivates us, keeps us authentic and focused on our passion.
We are so grateful for people like you – 10,000 strong so far. With little fanfare or prodding, you raise your voice in support of Firmament. Without you, we can’t build these worlds.
Based on our previous games, we know there are more of us out there – more people who truly enjoy this kind of adventure — easily ten times as many. With only 10 days left, we’d like to ask you to do one more thing — help find the missing people and bring them along. If each of you can reach out to just one more person who shares our interest in the deep, immersive worlds Cyan builds; one more person who is willing to support us before we ship – instead of after, we will easily meet our goal and be able to build Firmament.
We have come this far, let’s complete this journey!
Thank you so much for your support,
The Cyan Team
The studio’s penultimate Kickstarter saw Obduction (2016) brought to life, a game that launched on desktop, PC VR and PSVR headsets. Obduction’s crowdfunding campaign exceeded its initial goal of $1.1M back in November 2013, garnering a total of $1,321,306 with more than 20,000 backers.
Some of the excitement around Obduction invariably came from the prospect of stepping into a wholly new world built by Cyan, which had previously released both remastered versions, and an additional chapter to Myst. Virtual reality played no small part in its funding either. At the time, native Oculus support was a stretch goal, which the company promised at the $1.3 million mark. The prospect of stepping into a Cyan-built world, created in the tradition of its past games, was nothing short of tantalizing.
According to the recent backer update, the company says that meeting the crowdfunding goal is a prerequisite to building Firmament; if the project falls short, its possible the company will move onto ‘safer’ projects. Considering Obduction was their first title with VR support, the studio has likely taken home plenty of critical VR-specific learnings that could be applied to a game if built from the ground-up.
We’re wishing Firmament all the best, but with only a week to go in the campaign and no publicly playable demo (a short demo is available to backers) it may have a difficult time in repeating Obduction’s success.
Check out a video of the demo below (no commentary), recorded by YouTube user ‘EPICO’.