‘That Dragon, Cancer’ Kickstarter Fully Funded Beyond Initial Goal of $85,000


It is not very often that video games can make you cry, or tell a truly emotional story that can leave rooms of people playing a simple demo in tears. That Dragon, Cancer is one such game, and it has passed its fundraising target on Kickstarter. A goal of $85,000 was originally set to finish the game that tells the story of a young boy names Joel and his two parents who fought against Joel’s terminal cancer. The project reached $104,491 at the end of the month long Kickstarter with over 3,500 backers.

Video games are not a medium that most people think of when it comes to telling a story, much less a story that is meant to be emotionally and spiritually engaging. Much like the transition of cinema in the 1970s, video games are in a similar place where the Easy Rider’s of the medium are making their mark with games such as Papers, Please and Never Alone. These new mature-themed games have been made as simple text adventures or as retro themed worlds to tackle culturally relevant issues such as depression and bullying. While many games have attempted to give weight to death in real life, no game has had the perspective of the parents who watched their own child suffer and eventually succumb to the scorching dragon of cancer that is never seen, but is felt throughout this game.

That Dragon, Cancer is a tale of Joel, a boy who died of terminally aggressive brain cancer at the age of 5. His parents, Ryan and Amy Green, along with family friend Josh Larson, felt called to create a game that would tell their story. During the development of the game, Joel passed away due to his cancer. The passing of the Green’s son took the project in a new direction, and inspired the developers to take the game to a bigger audience. The idea was to not only tell the story of Ryan and Amy’s journey through the death of their child, but to make the player feel what it was like to simply be Joel. Even through short demos such as the one experienced by GameChurch.com in which the demo had a simple objective to stop baby Joel from crying in pain, the impact of this simple point and click adventure style game was not only tangible, but emotionally impactful.

That Dragon, Cancer was originally slated to launch on the OUYA, an underpowered video game console that runs on Android with a small, but loyal following, as the Inquisitr has reported on previously. While the game was originally slated to be an OUYA exclusive, the team wanted to make the jump to a larger audience on Windows and Mac. OUYA agreed that the story was important to share, and the Kickstarter was launched to help finish the game.

By the time the Kickstarter funding had been decided upon, a good portion of the game had been developed with a complete road map from start to finish. The final three areas needed to be built along with the normal polish and debugging that comes with game development. In order to do this, the families involved with the game had completely invested their life savings into the project, which still has another eight months left to go before completion. Combined with loans from IndieFUND and a private loan of $25,000, the total needed to finish the game with the Kickstarter backing is $160,000. Any funding that went over the asked for $85,000 will go to reducing the amount of loans needed to complete the game.

That Dragon, Cancer is slated to release in mid-2015 on the OUYA, Windows, and Mac computer via Steam.

DISCLAIMER – The author of this post is a backer of the Kickstarter fund.

[Image Source | That Dragon, Cancer Official Site]

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