Who says that time is a healer? Stainless Games certainly doesn’t think so, as it has demonstrated by lovingly digitizing Double Fine Production’s Tim Schafer for its Carmageddon: Reincarnation Kickstarter campaign, then running him over. Three times. (Check around the 3:09 mark in this video.)
Schafer’s crime? His classic point-and-click adventure, Grim Fandango, beat Stainless’ vehicular-combat game Carmageddon 2 to the number-one spot in sales, way back in 1998. Stainless co-founder Neil Barnden says it was a close thing, with Carmageddon 2 being edged out “by about 40 copies sold.”
Schafer, of course, is largely responsible for the huge wave of gaming Kickstarter campaigns we are currently seeing, since bagging a record $3.3M for the proposed “Double Fine Adventure.” The irony of this is not lost on Barnden, who remarks: “It’s a small world, but we have long memories…Tim,” before playing a clip of the digitized Schafer being pursued and knocked down.
Not content with simply running Schafer over once, his flattened image is also used to promote the $1,000 Kickstarter pledge package called “Fatal Immortality.” The reward for this level of donation is to have your likeness, or that of someone you dislike, inserted into the game as a pedestrian.
The third appearance of Schafer is on the Stainless Games website, where he is attached, rather uncomfortably, to the front grille of a dump truck.
Schafer appears to be taking the stunt in typically good humor, as it was presumably intended. When pointed via Twitter to the fact that, “there is a terrifying [flattened image] of your face on the BBC news,” Schafer replied: “Is ‘terrifying’ the British word for ‘arousing’?”
The Carmageddon: Reincarnation Kickstarter is looking for $400K and is currently on $173K after just a few days. Very much in the spirit of the original PC game, Carmageddon: Reincarnation will apparently “reintroduce the gaming world to the original free-form driving sensation, where pedestrians (and cows) equal points, and your opponents are a bunch of crazies in a twisted mix of automotive killing machines.”