Harebrained Schemes

Almost the minute our Second City Backer’s Survey went out, we began receiving responses. Within the first 2 minutes, we hit almost 500 votes!

It’s been fun refreshing the results page and seeing the votes come in. So fun, in fact, that we thought we’d share them with you.

HONG KONG emerged as an early front-runner but once our friends in Europe woke up, BERLIN surged forward! But wait, here comes the surprise contender: MORE SEATTLE!

Quick notes:

The survey will be open through Tuesday, May 15th 11:59pm PST and we’ll announce the results later next week.
If you haven’t received your email voting link yet, never fear! The survey system only allows about 10,000 emails to go out at a time.
If time starts running out and we find that people still haven’t received their ballots, we will extend the deadline so everyone can have their voices heard.
Around 20,000 people have yet to vote, so who knows what can happen?
We’re really excited about all of these places (no favorites here) and can’t wait to see how it comes out!

HBS

It’s May! It’s May!

And it’s also the official kickoff of Shadowrun Returns.

While the majority of the team bug-fixes, tunes, and polishes our new game, Strikefleet Omega, a core group has broken off to lay some of the groundwork for Shadowrun. It may not be exciting stuff from a player point-of-view but the team is really pumped that we are investing time now to maximize productivity later.

Speaking of pumped, we have to send a special thanks to everyone who hung out with us as we counted down the minutes until our Kickstarter close! It was definitely an exciting night for us. Feeling like we were sharing that moment with you was one of our favorite moments in game development. Together, we brought shadowrun.com to its knees! Another achievement unlocked!

A lot of people are asking us if we feel a lot of pressure to make a game with such high expectations. Of course we do! But that pressure is mitigated by your support.

Most of the time, when you start a game, you’re making an enormous guess. You create a concept doc, convince a publisher (and your team) that it’s the right thing to invest in and then spend months or years waiting to see if you’re right. It requires a giant act of faith for many.

This game is different (and strange and awesome) because we know you want it and that you’re as excited as we are. You’ve told us clearly (and often poetically) in mail, on the boards, and with your generous funding. It’s a fantastic feeling to know at the beginning of a project that you’re about to work very, very hard to make something people really, really want.

Thank you for that. It’s cool to be a part of it.

Okay, let’s talk business!

The Backer’s Survey to determine which city becomes our second location should go out sometime next week. We’ve been listening and a few cities are rising to the top but you still have time to discuss your favorites and why. Don’t worry about lobbying us—talk amongst yourselves! Your (thoughtful, respectful) debates are the best way for us to learn from you.

We’re also figuring out the best way to collect and manage all of your contact information, DocWagon card names and photos, shirt sizes, etc. You should see that in the coming weeks.

That’s it for this update. We’ll talk to you next week when we release the survey. Until then, look for us in the Shadowrun Returns forums on Shadowrun.com (yes, it’s much better now and will continue to improve with time).

Going forward, we’ll continue to update you whenever we have something useful to say—we don’t want to spam you with updates and we don’t have bandwidth to write these three times a week. We need to stay focused on making the game! But we promise to keep in touch regularly. It’s good for everyone.

Take care and thanks again,

HBS

Hey everybody!

Holy cow! You’re killing it! Keep up the momentum!

With just one day left on the Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter, the energy you’re projecting into our little closet is absolutely crackling. (Thanks, we need it!)

In his fireside chat video update, Jordan waxed poetic about your personal Shadowrun stories and how they’ve inspired us. So much, that our normally camera-shy team members (and couple of our friends) were compelled to share some of their Shadowrun stories with you.

So while you’ve been pushing the project closer and closer to $1.75m and we’ve been crunching to finish our latest game, our friends at Bootstrapper Studios edited together this little ditty.

Enjoy.

Again, we thank you for your incredible support in the closing hours of this amazing adventure.

HBS

#shadowrunreturns! #laboroflove

There are only 4 days left in our Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter! 4 days!!!

The outpouring of support for this project has been phenomenal and we deeply appreciate all of your comments, suggestions, stories and encouragement.

One of the recurring themes in the stories we hear is how the music of the Sega and SNES Shadowrun games stays with you after all this time. Whenever we read your comments and whenever the team talks about it, the conversation always comes back to, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get the guys who wrote the original music?”

So we did.

Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce that Marshall Parker, who wrote the music for the Super Nintendo game and Sam Powell, who wrote the music for the Sega Genesis game, have agreed to COLLABORATE on the music for Shadowrun Returns.

Not only are we excited to have these two talented people working on the project, (we still can’t believe we got them!) we’re impressed by the spirit of cooperation they both expressed. Marshall and Sam really understand what we’re trying to do here and it was a pleasure to hear how happy they would be to work together to bring you the Shadowrun music your generous support deserves.

Speaking of what your support deserves, let’s talk about Rewards!

• Check out the tasty DocWagon card concept art we added today!
• We’re sweetening the deal for our $30 Reward Level backers! In addition to everything they already get, they’ll also get the IN-GAME DocWagon benefit too!
• A Reminder: Every backer at the $50 level and above gets their own copy of the SOUNDTRACK!
• Reading through the comments about the Backer T-shirts, we see lots of fans for all three designs, so we’ve decided NOT to survey backers about which shirt back you want most. INSTEAD, backers at the $60.00 level and above get to choose which shirt they want!

But what if you still can’t decide? What if you want ALL 3 SHIRTS???

Then our NEW $175 Reward Level is for you! At $175, you get all previous rewards (excluding the All-Digital Bundle) + all 3 Shadowrun Returns Backer T-Shirts.

Did we mention that there are only 4 days left?!

That’s 4 days for you to help the Cause by spreading the word. There are still Shadowrun fans out there who don’t know about our Kickstarter. There are still gamers out there who would LOVE Shadowrun if only they knew about it! There are still people out there that don’t know we changed our $7,500 Reward Level to include a game of tabletop Shadowrun in our studio with Jordan and Mike Mulvihill!!!

This is a call to action, Chummer. Spread the word. Every dollar YOU bring in goes into making a better, richer, and deeper Shadowrun experience.

Share the link to our Kickstarter page via Facebook, Google +, Twitter, secret courier. . . Pinterest, whatever.
Share the link to the Shadowrun Primer and bring new people into the fold.
Use the “Shadowrun Kickstarter Backer” images on your blog, use them as your Facebook cover image, and share them on the internets. (You can find more images here.)
Tweet and RT your love. Use #shadowrunreturns so everyone can participate.
Use peer pressure (for the right reasons this time) to get your friends involved.
What’s in it for you? You’ll make Shadowrun Return.

Go, go, go!

And thanks,

HBS

Last week we announced that if our funding hit $1.5m, we’ll create a special story, just for backers, that connects the plots in the SNES and Sega Shadowrun games. It’s our way of saying thank you for all your support. Your reaction was immediate, passionate, and inspiring.

It seems like everyone is really excited about the mission (we are too!), but an overwhelming number of you don’t want that the mission to be exclusive for backers. You want everyone who loves Shadowrun to be able to experience it.

That’s awesome.

Your generosity of spirit and your support for people who aren’t (yet, we hope) involved in this Kickstarter really says something important about the Shadowrun Community and we’re proud to be a part of it. But we still want to say “thank you” to everyone supporting the project and putting their faith in us.

So here’s what we’re going to do: If we’re lucky enough to get to $1.5m, we’ll create that story and make it available only to backers but for an exclusive period of time. Then, we’ll open it up so that everyone can see how the dots between Jake and Harlequin are connected.

Everybody plays. Everybody wins. Everybody calls DocWagon.

You people are incredible. As of this writing, we have well over 6,000 posts on our Kickstarter page alone. Add to that the thousands more on Reddit, Dumpshock, Facebook, the comments pages of sites hosting articles about the project, and the gazillion private messages and emails we receive and one thing is clear—people are talking about Shadowrun Returns.

Back when Jordan first created Shadowrun, this sort of community interaction just wasn’t possible. The best way (it felt like the only way) to communicate with fans was in person at game conventions. Not a very efficient method, but a fun one! Happily, the Digital Age is upon us and we feel very lucky to have the ability to read your comments, listen to your debates, and write blog posts like these.

As we look across all the myriad websites and forums, it’s become quite apparent that this community needs a place of its own: a Shadowrun Universe website.

• One place where fans of every aspect of Shadowrun (remember the collectible card game?) come together to learn, to express themselves, and to have fun.
• One place where everyone we can share a love of Shadowrun: forums, fiction, art, videos, news . . . everything.
• One place where we can check in with you.

So, in that spirit of community, we’ve teamed up with our friends at Cliffhanger Productions, who are developing Shadowrun Online and with Catalyst Game Labs, the producers of the Shadowrun tabletop game, to make this a reality.

Just to be clear: we are not going to use any of the Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter money to fund the Shadowrun Universe website.

Our Kickstarter project is about creating a new Shadowrun game with your generous support. The Shadowrun Universe website is about all of us revitalizing and re-energizing a game setting that we’ve loved for years.

More on this later when we’ve worked through the details. For now, back to crunching!

Thanks again! You make this worth doing!

HBS