Hitting the $1 million fundraising goal in a little over a week is fairly impressive for any crowd-funding campaign, especially when said project is using a “roll your own” crowd-funding solution independent of any of the major websites that exist for that purpose. But that is what Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen managed to do, hitting the $1 million mark early this morning.

However, in an effort to both offer more options for people to help fund the project and to alleviate some of the…website stability woes that the Roberts Space Industries site has been suffering lately, Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games today announced the launch of a Kickstarter campaign for Star Citizen.

And here’s the text of the official press release, which went live at the same moment the Kickstarter campaign did:

Overwhelming Positive Response to Star Citizen Crowd Funding Crashes Web Site; Developer Announces Kickstarter Campaign
Game designer Chris Roberts says Kickstarter to provide relief to many fans unable to pledge; epic space sim game well on its way to reaching two million dollar goal

LOS ANGELES, October 18, 2012 — Last week’s high profile announcement of Chris Roberts’ return to gaming and his highly anticipated PC space sim game, Star Citizen™, caused such a rush of support, the servers at www.robertsspaceindustries.com (the Star Citizen site) that hosted the game’s independently maintained crowd funding program simply collapsed leaving thousands of would-be pledgers and supporters on the outside looking in for days.

Today, the legendary game designer announced a solution to that problem. Roberts and his newly formed company, Cloud Imperium™, launched a Kickstarter campaign, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen, which will provide a stable and scalable crowd funding platform in addition to the custom one hosted on the Star Citizen site to help Roberts reach the company’s stated goal of raising a minimum of two million dollars for Star Citizen.

Despite the problems, which included multiple days without any pledge service on the Roberts Space Industries site, the company still managed to raise one million dollars in one week. “It’s a testament to the will power of our amazing fans,” said Roberts. “At a time when most would have given up, some dedicated fans kept trying to log on and eventually were able to get through and make a pledge. We appreciate all those efforts and now with Kickstarter, we believe we have an answer for everyone.

“It is all about giving our fans the opportunity to choose the platform and payment provider they feel the most comfortable with. We asked whether they wanted Kickstarter as an option and they spoke! Between Kickstarter and the original site, which supports Paypal and major credit cards, I believe we have the tools in place to make everyone feel comfortable in backing this game. I would also like to take a moment to thank the great people at Kickstarter. They were quick to offer help and have been great as we put together a solution.

“Those who pledged via Roberts Space Industries through our very rough first week of operation and those who make a pledge going forward on Kickstarter or on our site will all have their pledges tied directly to their Roberts Space Industries account,” said Roberts. “Nothing has changed there. We just hope that people will understand the situation we were in and support us and support what we plan on bringing to the table for PC gamers everywhere.”

So, if you hadn’t yet chipped in to support Chris Roberts’ exciting new space sim, there’s now a second option open to you in terms of how you can do so. At the very least, hit up the Kickstarter site for what I think is just a bit of a better layout of information about Star Citizen and what sort of game it will be.