The Bard’s Tale IV hits Kickstarter

June 8th, 2015 9:33 AM
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Brian Fargo is at it again. After creating The Bard’s Tale and Wasteland on the Apple II for Interplay three decades ago, he revived the latter franchise in 2012 via Kickstarter; the result, Wasteland 2, has an 81% average rating. Now Fargo seeks to crowdfund a revival of The Bard’s Tale:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/the-bards-tale-iv

More than a concept, the game already has an in-engine graphics demo that looks quite impressive:

However, there’s more to a series than its titular lineage or polygon count. Any time a franchise is revived years after its debut, there’s a question of how much of the original talent is still involved. Two years ago, Richard Garriott successfully crowdfunded a game called Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. It doesn’t have the name "Ultima", and it wasn’t published by Origins or Electronic Arts — but it’s nonetheless an Ultima game in all but name only, as only the creator of that fantasy world could produce.

Similarly, The Bard’s Tale may not involve the most prominent developers and designers to contribute to its last outing. Rebecca Heineman, programmer of 1988’s The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, says she offered to contribute to Fargo’s latest project — an offer that was declined. Her team at Olde Sküül is instead working on a dungeon crawler of their own, entitled Dragons of the Rip — prompting her to ask on Facebook, "Do you want a game by someone who financed Bard’s Tale, or by the people who actually MADE Bard’s Tale III?"

Fortunately, we do not live in an either-or world. Fargo’s Kickstarter will almost certainly achieve its crowdfunding goal of $1.25M — at the time of this writing, it’s 85% funded with 34 days to go — so we can look forward to playing both The Bard’s Tale and Dragons of the Rip. It’s a good time to be a retrogamer!

UPDATE (11-Jun-15):

Exciting news today: every backer of The Bard’s Tale IV ($20 or more) will get free digital copies of the original The Bard’s Tale, The Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight and The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate!

The emulated versions of the classic games will be released for free at the end of the campaign for every backer at $20 or higher, and distributed through our backer web site. This is our way of giving our thanks back to you for all your support and helping us bring back The Bard’s Tale.

Some of you may know that the emulated versions of these games work on most modern machines, but are a little rough around the edges. Thus, we have an agreement with the original The Bard’s Tale III programmer Rebecca “Burger” Heineman and her company Olde Skueuel to update the games for modern machines! She will be working to make the games run natively, without needing emulators, on PC or Mac. This re-releases will be primarily based on the Apple IIGS versions of the games, along with updated art.