In addition to being a seminal film drama, Apocalypse Now could also be billed as “a survival horror experience,†which is exactly what a team of independent video-game makers want to turn it into, with the viewer at the helm controlling the story. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and his American Zoetrope studio have blessed the development of an Apocalypse Now game, and the developers behind it have launched a Kickstarter campaign to realize their vision. But wouldn’t a big company just pay for this kind of game based on a popular preexisting property with their own resources? The answer is probably yes, but what these game makers don’t want to do is make a first-person shooter out of it, instead framing the game as a narrative horror set deep in the psychosis and battlefields of the Vietnam War. Meaning, as Captain Benjamin Willard, you could choose your own sort of adventures.
“I want to make a game where you can sit on the boat and drop acid if that’s what you want to do,†says executive producer Lawrence Liberty. So to keep it free-form, and to keep it just from being about body count, they’ve gone outside the system and are looking to raise $900,000 by the end of February to satisfy production costs, with additional “Backer Mission†benchmarks as high as $5,000,000 that would net goodies like expanded content, era-appropriate popular music licensing for the soundtrack, and platform expansions. (Don’t you want to experience Vietnam in VR?)
The team is working in participation with Zoetrope, and their résumés include work on past games such as Fallout: New Vegas, The Witcher, Everquest, and more. So if you want to be immersed in a world that’s “full of tension, horrors both real and imagined, and great psychological drama†you can check out the Kickstarter here.