Despite Infinitron Dragon’s periodic prompting, I’ve been keeping mum concerning rumours of inXile Entertainment’s intent to create a formal sequel to Wasteland, the post-apocalyptic RPG that is arguably the grandfather of modern exmplars of that particular sub-genre, such as the Fallout games. I didn’t make mention of Brian Fargo’s hope to start a Kickstarter for a Wasteland sequel. I didn’t make mention of the composer of Fallout and Fallout 2’s soundtrack, Mark Morgan, and his announced intent to join on with the project. I didn’t mention it when Brian Fargo confirmed that the title of the project would be Wasteland 2, or that Ken St. Andre had joined up with the project. And interviews like this also passed without comment.

However:

With the formal Kickstarter project now live as of…this morning, or perhaps late last night, I for one am happy to report that Wasteland 2 is being made. Or will be made, if inXile Entertainment can raise at least $900,000 in funding over the course of the next 34 days.

…we need to raise $1 million, but you’ll notice our funding request is $900,000 and that is because Brian Fargo has offered to fund the last $100,000 if need be. That’s a lot of money needed, but not when compared with the budgets of most full scale RPGs made today. The original game sold over 100,000 copies — on the Apple ][ and Commodore 64 platforms back in the day. If everyone who played it then backs the project at the most basic level, the game is on.

But we’re looking ahead to what we can do if you all back this project in force. At $1.25 million, the money will go primarily into making the world bigger, adding more maps, more divergent stories and even more music.

At $1.5 million, the world gets even bigger. You’ll have more adventures to play, more challenges to deal with, and a greater level of complexity to the entire storyline. We’ll add more environments, story elements, and characters to make the rich world come alive even more. We will even be able to bring Wasteland 2 to OS X for Mac lovers. And after $1.5 million the sky is the limit.

As I began writing this post, the project had already garnered $75,958 in support; having reached this point in the text, I’m happy to report that it has risen to $83,194 (a gain of over $7,000 in a matter of minutes!). If post-apocalyptic RPGs are your bag, Dragons and Dragonettes, click on over and toss inXile a few dollars in support of their goal. Putting just $15 in the kitty nets you a DRM-free copy of the game when it comes out, donating more gets you even more cool stuff. For donations of $5,000 or more, they’ll build a (presumably miniature) statue of you and include you in the annals of Wasteland history in that and other ways. ($86,481)

Now…just for reference, the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter page is still live (though with just a couple hours to go, amusingly enough). That crowdsourcing effort has netted over $3 million for Double Fine’s proposed old-school adventure game.

So, to pose a question that Infinitron Dragon put to me earlier this morning: which genre has the more generous (and the most) “old school” fans: adventure, or RPG? Which of these two projects will raise more funding overall, and which will have more donors? We’ll know in 34 days! ($88,436, by the way.)