“Spiderweb Software’s latest crappy-looking RPG is now live,” I wrote about Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror back in 2019. Rude? No, it was entirely affectionate: Spiderweb, a husband-and-wife team of Jeff Vogel and Mariann Krizsan, makes games that look like they come from the Gold Box era but have depth and flexibility that make most modern games green with envy. They’re old fashioned, but also really good RPGs.
Which brings us to the point: Spiderweb is remaking its 2005 release Geneforge 3, as Geneforge 3: Detonation, and its Kickstarter campaign has crushed its goal in just 24 hours.
It’s not really a surprise that the Geneforge 3 remake blew past its goal so quickly. Spiderweb games don’t have a huge audience, but its fans are very reliable and committed, and have consistently demonstrated that they’re willing to pay for what they like. Spiderweb, importantly, has also demonstrated an ability to deliver. Geneforge 3: Detonation is the studio’s sixth Kickstarter campaign: All of them were successfully funded, released, and hold “very positive” ratings across a few hundred user reviews on Steam.
But that bedrock of support was established long before the days of Kickstarter. “From day one, we provided the player with a wide variety of races and sexes to choose from for player avatars,” Vogel told me in a 2016 interview. “In 1994, this was pretty radical, and it got us a lot of very long-term fans who had never seen anything like it.”