Hit all stretch goals, set records
It doesn’t feel like it has been a month since we were first asked “sword or whip?” or we first heard the term “Igavania,” but here we are. Koji Igarashi and company launched the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night hoping for $500,000 in pledges to prove that there is still a market for this kind of game. It made that total in under four hours.
Thanks to some clever gamification of the Kickstarter itself, it maintained a lot of steam throughout the month, barreling through stretch goals as quickly as they were posted. In addition to the original vision, the project now includes multiple playable characters, Wii U and Vita versions, a fully orchestrated soundtrack, a prequel minigame, and a handful of new modes: speed run, boss rush, classic, online challenge, procedurally generated, new game plus, and boss revenge modes. It attained that last mode in the final hours of the campaign when it hit $5.5 million.
One of the last things to unlock came by way of the backer achievements. With 61 social media goals achieved, backers unlocked an alternate costume for protagonist Miriam representing her look before the stained glass curse took hold on her body (pictured above). It turns out she used to be a blonde! Who knew?
The Bloodstained Kickstarter ended with $5,545,992 pledged by 64,867 backers (averaging $87.50 per backer), edging out Reading Rainbow as the eighth-highest funded project in all Kickstarter categories. It also claimed the top spot for funding of a video game from Torment: Tides of Numenera. Combined with a reported $213,000 in PayPal donations that don’t show up on the Kickstarter total, Bloodstained raised over $5,750,000 by the end.
And now comes the excruciating part: after this month of excitement, we wait for two years. Urgh.
