'Old-School RPG' Shaker's Kickstarter cancelled two weeks in

Excited about Brenda Braithwaite and Tom Hall's Shaker: An Old-School RPG ? Don't be: the pair have canned its crowfunding drive two weeks and a quarter of a million dollars in, via a message on the (confusingly still live) Kickstarter page .

"Ultimately, our pitch just wasn't strong enough to get the traction we felt it needed to thrive," the update reveals. "Sure, it may have made it. We could have fought our way to a possibly successful end. In reading your feedback and talking it over internally, however, we decided that it made more sense to kill it and come back with something stronger."

The project, initially known only as Old-School RPG, eventually gained the moniker Shaker, but beyond that we knew very few details about the actual game, other than the fact that it was, well, an old-school RPG. (The more we type that, the more it sounds like it's a turn-based adaptation of Grange Hill.) Loot Drop's pitch revolved mainly around nostalgia, and the legacy of its two leads: Wizardry designer Brenda Braithwaite and id/Ion Storm co-founder Tom Hall.

Cancelling the Kickstarter is a surprising move, but it's probably for the best, seeing as they didn't appear to have a clear idea of what the game was before asking for a million dollars to make it. Thankfully, Kickstarter only withdraws cash when a project is successfully funded, so Shaker's backers haven't lost any money because of this.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.