Former Dawn Kickstarter Is A Big Fat Disappointment

I’ve been following the development of Former Dawn for months. It promises to be the most advanced NES homebrew ever made, pushing the system to limits no retail game in the console’s lifetime ever achieved. Today was the day the long-awaited Kickstarter campaign launched for the project, and….well, it’s a good thing the EGM Compendium was launched on the same day, to take some of the disappointment away.

What am I talking about? Well, I’m gonna have to explain how the NES works first and why this game is so amazing. The machine as-is was built to run an arcade-perfect version of Donkey Kong. Everything else it was able to do is from the achievement of “mappers” — special chips in each cartridge board that manage the memory space in the NES. Since it’s not very large, you can make bigger games by swapping out what’s stored in that memory. Some of the most advanced mapper chips toward the end of the NES life cycle could even add special effects like extra sound channels.

As I said two paragraphs ago, Former Dawn was engineered to do things the NES has never done before. It has its own sound chip, it can draw unique graphics for the entire screen, It can use a higher color density, it can produce faux parallax effects and it can even run FMVs. To achieve all that, the game needed its own custom, never-before-seen mapper built. That fact means the raw digital ROM will be incompatible with all NES emulators in existence, and it won’t work on flash carts like Everdrive either. If you want to see all this wizardry happen on a real NES, you must buy the physical cart.

The Kickstarter for Former Dawn limited its amount of carts to just 200, and sold out of them in minutes. I myself was not aware the campaign was up until it was too late.

So what are they selling really? The Steam version. On Steam, there will be nothing special about Former Dawn. NES-styled RPGs and adventure games are a dime a dozen over there. Everyone was looking forward to playing this ON THE NES. What is the point of achieving all this if you can’t even see it where it counts? I feel baited and let down, and I’m not alone.

Something Nerdy Studios, creators of Former Dawn, say the cost and effort of making the physical carts is just too much (so why didn’t they price them higher?) and now says they could add more physical editions ONLY if their initial goal is met. That goal is $160,000 — incredibly high for an NES homebrew, but something that might’ve been achievable if anyone could buy a physical edition.

UPDATE: In response to the backlash, Something Nerdy has relented and is now offering unlimited physical NES carts on multiple tiers. They’re more expensive, but it’s the price they should’ve been at from the beginning, and the important thing is they’re there. Keep an eye on the Kickstarter page — Former Dawn needs to hit its goal by November 14.