Bad news for fans of multiplayer car carnage: MotorGun‘s Kickstarter has been cancelled due to lack of interest, after raising less than 10% of its $650,000 USD goal in just over a week.
It’s not like it didn’t have much of a pedigree. Dev team Pixelbionic count Twisted Metal‘s David Jaffe and Interstate ’76‘s Zack Norman as two of their members, and one of the stretch goals was to bring Kickstarter socialite Chris Avellone on board. Because he’s presumably not busy enough with work on Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, and Torment: Tides of Numenera. That poor man must be getting bored, with only three wordy RPGs to work on. And isn’t he writing a comic or a background novella for something else? Hmm.
This isn’t necessarily the end of the dream, though. The cancellation post notes that “we’re going to cancel the campaign and start working to reformulate it” and that fans can “tell us what you liked and what you didn’t and you can help shape the next phase of this wild adventure.”
Personally, I’m burned out on multiplayer-only games. Pixelbionic did relent and state that they would add a short single-player campaign due to “listening to our backers and our community’s overwhelming response”, which may imply that whenever MotorGun re-emerges, it’ll have more of a substantial single-player component.
Motorgun was formerly known as Autoduel, which was a bit confusing if you’re one of the 17 people who remembers the 1985 RPG of the same name. I fully expect its name to have changed again by the next time it revs its engines in our direction.