10 Crowdfunded Video Games That Never Saw The Light Of Day
3. Clang
Goal:
£500,000 – Raised: $526,125
Spearheaded by Neal Stephenson – the author of Snow Crash, Seveneves and Quicksilver – Clang was an ambitious project undone by its own aspirations. In 2014, the game was cancelled following a successful kickstarer campaign, raising over half a million dollars in funding.
Regardless, the budget soon wasted away as the project grew is scale, transforming shape multiple times in the process, and refusing to settle on a single concept.
Prior to its cancellation, a prototype demo was released to backers, but the response was unenthusiastic, the vast majority of players finding themselves indifferent towards the entire experience.
Clang was a technically innovative game consisting of numerous admirable qualities – including historical accuracy – but it wasn’t much fun to actually play. As a result, the project changed forms multiple times despite dwindling finances, and was eventually cancelled once no new publishers could be convinced to take the project on board.
It’s a crying shame. Clang was packed with potential, but ultimately, it was considered too much of a risk for publishers to salvage. In the end, had the developers settled on a core concept, and ignored any extraneous details, maybe the project would have proven less costly. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.