Shadowrun: Hong Kong smashes Kickstarter goal

A Kickstarter campaign for a second sequel to role-playing reboot Shadowrun Returns has hit its funding goal in just two hours, guaranteeing its creation.

Shadowrun Returns, from Harebrained Schemes, hit Kickstarter back in 2012 with a reasonably modest $400,000 goal. It promised to bring back the Shadowrun role-playing game franchise, offering a mixture of technology and magic set in a cyberpunk alternative future, as a proper RPG - as opposed to Microsoft's 2007 reboot, which re-imagined the franchise as a multiplayer first-person shooter. The project smashed its goal, ending with $1.8 million in funds, and launched on tablets, smartphones and PCs in 2013 to generally positive reviews.

An expansion, Dragonfall, followed both as an add-on for the original game and as a standalone title - and now the company is back for a third crack of the whip with Shadowrun: Hong Kong. 'We’ve already begun development of the Hong Kong game,' claimed Mitch Gitelman, co-founder of Harebrained Schemes and executive producer of Shadowrun, at the launch of the Kickstarter campaign. 'We’re self-funding the first 12 hours of gameplay at the quality level of Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut. But we have plenty of ideas for features and runs that didn’t fit into our budget. We love Kickstarter and we think there’s no better co-funding partner than our fans to help us take our game to the next level.'

The promise that development is already under way from a studio proven to have succeeded with Kickstarter projects in the past, and that backers will be given an opportunity to influence the game's design, appears to have struck a chord with the company's fanbase. Its extremely modest $100,000 goal was smashed within two hours of the project going live, with the current total standing at nearly $316,000 with 34 days still to go.

'[Hitting the goal] means we'll be able to add Enhanced Player Controls, Animatic Scene Transitions and Racter, our favourite Russian, to your team,' the company announced in its first update to the project. 'All we want is to do our very best work for an audience who wants what we're making. So, thanks for the (rapid) outpouring of support.'

The game is expected to launch in mid-2015 for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and OS X. More details are available on the official Kickstarter page, where rewards start at $15 for a digital copy of the game on PC plus soundtracks from all three titles.