The Kickstarter campaign for Gun Media’s Friday the 13th: The Game has ended this past Friday, and to save the trouble for all the people who’re now looking for their calendars, yes it was indeed the 13th. The campaign earned a total of $823,704 from 12,218 backers, having met and surpassed it’s $700,000 funding goal two days prior.
The game itself is going to be a third-person, multiplayer game based around a 1 vs 7 playstyle. The elevator pitch is that one player gets to control Jason Voorhees, while the seven others take control of the camp counselors who have to survive the night. Each camp counselor falls under a certain classic horror archetype, such as the “The Jock”, “The Edgy Guy”, and even “Girl Next Door”, these different characters will apparently be able to play different roles in the game, allowing for a different experience based on which character your given. This alone sounds pretty interesting, being basically “tag” with the addition of 80s horror nostalgia, but it looks like the developers are doing their best to go above and beyond with the execution of the game. By the end of it’s campaign the game was able to get funding for 8 of it’s 38 stretch goals, which have allowed the addition of even more sadistic environmental kills, such as “Sleeping Bag Kill”, “Mirror Smash”, and “Rip Your Heart Out” (yep, these are all going to be in the game). A stretch goal that I kind of wish we could’ve been able to see was the $4,525,000 goal, which was called “Jason Takes Manhattan”, which promised an additional map based on New York City. This alone goes to show how crazy this game is going to be, and how far the dev team is willing to go with this project.
The team currently working on the game is an all-star cast of developers and designers as well as a multitude of horror legends. This includes people who worked on the classic Friday the 13th films, such as Sean S. Cunningham (The director of both Friday the 13th and it’s remake as well as The Last House on the Left), Kane Hodder (Played Jason Voorhees in four of the Friday the 13th films) who will be doing mo-cap for the game’s Jason, Harry Manfredini (Composer for over 120 films, including several from the Friday the 13th series) as sound designer and musical composer, and even Tom Savini (Actor in a number of classic horror films, including Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead) who is apparently “masterminding” all of the horror, gore and brutality found in the game.
The game is expected to launch sometime in October next year and is slated for release on PC, as well as both Xbox One and PS4.