Nox Archaist: Now on Kickstarter

Nox Archaist is, you’ll hopefully recall, “a tile-based, 8-bit, sword-and-sorcery role-playing game modeled after the iconic RPGs of the 1980s.” It is under active development by a team who call themselves 6502 Workshop, and is projected to be released in December of 2018.

The developers have launched a crowdfunding campaign for the game on Kickstarter…not so much to fund further work on the game, but instead to give it the sort of physical box that a game so obviously inspired by Ultima deserves:

We launched this Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to produce a collector’s edition loaded with feelies!

Our goals for this project are to both capture the retro-gaming experience from the 1980s and explore what might have happened if commercial RPG development had continued on 8-bit computers to the present day.

If you’re hardcore enough to play Nox Archaist on a real Apple II we will send you the game on old-school media – 5.25″ floppy disks (4 doubled-sided disks estimated). We’ve also ensured the game is playable on modern Mac and Windows PCs via emulator.

We are developing Nox Archaist from scratch, in assembly language, on real Apple II hardware. We’re talking handmade quality bits here. All 8 of them.

And wow, do these feelies look top-tier:

nox-archaist-feelies

The minimum spend for the Kickstarter campaign is $19 USD; this gets you an electronic copy of the game, and digital copies of the manuals. $29 USD is the “plastic bag” tier; you get a USB drive with copies of the game for Windows and OS X. $39 USD will get you the above-mentioned 5.25″ diskettes.

If you actually want to grab the full Collector’s Edition box, that will run you $119 USD.

Currently, Nox Archaist has raised $8,288 of its $43,078 USD goal, with 31 days to go in its campaign. If old-school Apple II RPGs are your thing, this might just be one to back!