Planned to harness the spirit of cult classic duo MDK and Giants: Citizen Kabuto, First Wonder was definitely something some people wanted. But not enough people to see it reach its lofty funding goal on Kickstarter, which was cancelled before it was even 10% funded. It didn’t end there, though. After the closing of the Kickstarter, developer Rocket Rocket Games were confident that development would continue. Unfortunately, the project has since been cancelled
If you’re a fan of the classics, there are plenty of them in our list of the best PC games.
It looked like First Wonder was actually going to happen, and it certainly seemed promising – we even did a feature on how its influences would feed into the game.
Rocket Rocket Games were hoping to find funding outside of Kickstarter, but they were unsuccessful, as revealed in an email to Kickstarter backers, via Reddit.
“After the kickstarter failed we looked for other opportunities and partnerships to keep the development going. While your donations helped we were still self-funding 95% of the project directly out of pocket. The amount of investment needed to get the game to the next stage was too large for us to handle by ourselves.
“We had some interesting conversations but regardless of how excited some were for the project it came down to numbers and risk. For publishers, the kickstarter showed we just didn’t have or couldn’t find the audience.”
For now the studio has disbanded, with the developers focusing on “other projects and jobs” in the games industry for the time being. For anyone who funded the game, refunds are being processed, which is about the best you could hope for from a situation like this.
That doesn’t mean the idea is dead entirely, however, as the email concludes with a glimmer of hope: “I’m still very passionate about making games like these. I always will be.
“They are unique and therefore rather hard to sell but once we get a [foothold]I think they’ll be here to stay. I remain undeterred but it’s clearly been too many years since Giants and MDK and If I want to build games like First Wonder then I have to start off much smaller, simpler and grow a new audience. I have such a game in mind.”