Aaron Rasmussen was 16 years old when a chemistry teacher told him to mix red phosphorous and potassium chlorate.

The two chemicals are volatile when mixed, but they don't normally combust without some form of impact. But these chemicals were in their pure form. The blast hit Rasmussen straight in the eyes, knocking him out. When he awoke, he was blind – a condition the doctors said might be permanent.

"Step one was figuring out what room I was in," he said. "Step two was running into things. Step three was getting the hang of navigating blind."

To Rasmussen, it was reminiscent of the careful learning process of a new videogame. Over time, Rasmussen's vision slowly healed, but the memories of blindness never faded. He decided he wanted to share the experience with the world in the form of a game where the player must stumble around in the dark. To fund the game, called Blindside, Rasmussen turned to Kickstarter, the crowdsourcing website that lets artists with a big idea but no money seek funding from potential customers.

Within a month and a half, Rasmussen and Astolfi had raised over $14,000 from 550 different sponsors hooked by the idea of a game that can't be seen.

BlindSide, which Rasmussen expects will be released early this year, isn't an anomaly. Since its founding in 2009, Kickstarter has already generated millions of dollars in funding for gaming-related projects as diverse as a museum of gaming culture and a zombie-fueled workout game for your phones. Developers are finding that the combination of free publicity and early engagement with the gaming community can help generate fans for a project while it is still just an idea. And crowdsourced funding lets inexperienced coders avoid the complicated and frustrating process of wooing big game publishers. In 2011, film and music projects were the most popular Kickstarter projects, but games boasted the largest increase in backers: nearly 46,000 backers pledged over $3.6 million last year, a 730 percent increase in funders from 2010. Some 253 gaming projects were deemed successful.

"BlindSide is a passion project, so we would’ve made it happen however we needed to," Rasmussen says. "[Without Kickstarter] it just would’ve taken much longer, and we would've had to cut a lot of corners."

Selling Ideas

Founded in 2009 by day trader Perry Chen, Kickstarter is a crowdfunding tool that has evolved into a literal marketplace of ideas, facilitating generosity and serving as a financial pipeline between auteurs and their fans. The website allows anybody to pitch their projects and seek funding from potential customers.

The process is simple. First, somebody asks for donations to fund a project, like a book or a webseries or a set of graphic novels. He sets a financial goal and a deadline by which to meet it. If he raises enough money before the deadline, the project is funded. If the goal isn't hit, nobody pays.

It's a process that has done wonders for many aspiring gamemakers and indie developers. Game ideas on Kickstarter have found loads of success, even when they're not as unusual as BlindSide.

Fara, a mobiles action-role-playing game created by two former employees of Doom maker id Software, earned almost $6,000 on Kickstarter. That money was was essential to getting the game off the ground, said co-creator Andrew Strickland.

"We had put so much of our own personal money into buying advertising and paying for our cost of existing while the game was finishing," he said in a phones interview. "I think near the end we thought we might be in some trouble if we didn't have somebody supporting us."

"Without Kickstarter, we might not have had any advertising money."Strickland and co-creator Brett Estabrook used the Kickstarter cash to place advertisements on gaming websites like Destructoid.

"Without Kickstarter, we might not have had any advertising money," Strickland said. "It doesn't go real far, but helps to know that you're at least spreading the word."

Kickstarter can get customers invested, both literally and figuratively, in a game before it is released. With nothing but an idea, a bit of video and a few screenshots, a developer can start building a loyal fan base.

The promise of fostering a personal connection with a game's developer can get people to open their wallets in advance. Jon Krusell, a frequent Kickstarter donator who helped back Fara, says he isn't even interested in RPGs.

"If I like the personality of the team, I may donate even if I don’t intend to use the product myself," Krusell said in an e-mail. "By donating to Fara I was able to live vicariously through the dev team."

Jeff Hsu, whose iphoness game Catball Eats It All earned over $4,000 on Kickstarter, feels similarly. He says he used the crowdfunding website as a way to drum up publicity and collect early feedback from potential players.

Kickstarter also allows developers like Hsu to circumvent the traditional process of getting a game published. For inexperienced, small developers, getting funding from big game publishers can be a Sisyphean task.

"Pitching to a publisher or other major investor is a really involved process," Hsu said. "It requires that you first get in touch with them, find the right people to talk to, pitch your game, catch their interest, and if you get
that far, then you'll need to negotiate funding and terms, including who gets what. It's simply too much work for time-strapped indie game developers."

Dancing in the Dark

Some years after his temporary brush with blindness, Aaron Rasmussen was studying at Boston University when he befriended a fellow undergrad named Michael T. Astolfi. The two clicked immediately, bonding over weekly poker nights and a shared love for all things gaming. Both had grown up surrounded by videogames; both had dabbled in programming.

In 2011, the pair began work on BlindSide. They envisioned an adventure game like Zork or Myst, one that dropped players into a strange new place and forced them to solve environmental puzzles using nothing but a few basic keyboard commands. The twist, of course, is that you are blind, navigating the game's world and escaping its monsters with nothing but your ears and your wits.

Several months into the project, Rasmussen and Astolfi had a problem. They felt that they had a winning idea, but in order to execute it well they were going to need more money. They had to pay voice actors and buy software distribution licenses, not to mention pay rent and eat food. With no income stream and no publisher footing the bills, they couldn't afford to work full time on BlindSide.

They considered throwing the whole project on a couple of credit cards and praying that they would sell enough copies of the game to make the money back, but that was a huge gamble. Kickstarter was less of a risk: If they didn't get enough funding to comfortably complete the game, no one had to donate at all and they could try another idea.

The pair put up a video, a FAQ and a long description of BlindSide on the Kickstarter page. They then sent out links to various media outlets, some of which picked up the story and linked their page. Between press exposure and word of mouth, fans flocked to the fledgling game.

"It's a great idea," said Bo Gehring, a former audio developer who donated $25 to BlindSide. "I have a background in 3-D audio and have been waiting for something like this to come along."

Donating to a Kickstarter project isn't just for charity: Every page has a list of tiered prizes that donators can receive. The more you donate, the bigger the reward. Donate over $250 to BlindSide, for example, and you'll get a personalized version of the game, recorded with your name in place of the main character's. Pledging over $1,000 to Fara meant that backers would see non-playable characters named after them pop up in the game's world.

Kickstarters for indie games usually give out free copies of the game to donors. But there are some exceptions. Star Command, a sci-fi simulation game for ioses and androids that was successfully funded in October, had a boldfaced note on its Kickstarter page advising donors that they couldn't get the game free.

Star Command co-creator Jordan Coombs says this wasn't done out of malice or greed but out of sheer necessity. For every free copy of Star Command he gives away, he loses a potential download on iTunes or the androids Marketplace, he said. And without those downloads, he can't get the game on one of the featured lists that drive a large portion of sales in both mobiles stores.

"You simply have to get onto these lists or the general public will never even know about your game," Coombs said in an e-mail. "If you dont, you become lost in the deep sea of 'non-Top 25 Apps' purgatory."

Coombs was successful regardless, earning almost $37,000 for Star Command, which he describes as "sci-fi meets Game Dev Story." Perhaps the massive success drew from his other rewards, which included posters, MP3 soundtracks and dedicated in-game characters for anybody who donated over $1,000, an offer that two people took him up on.

"Kickstarter really gives these donators a way to feel satisfied and even accomplished by donating with their tiered rewards system," says Craig Snyder, a backer who has donated to almost 30 Kickstarter projects including Fara. "It's cool to donate and contribute to the development of these projects, but it's even cooler to receive a little bit of acknowledgement and thanks in the form of being mentioned in the credits of a game."

Snyder says he has given between $10 and $30 each to around a dozen gaming-related projects. He has not regretted a single one, he says.

Kickstarter For Big-League Games?

One of the successes of Kickstarter is that it takes the guesswork out of greenlighting games. Publishers of larger games have to carefully choose which titles they publish, lest they lose a bunch of money on a quirky game that doesn't sell. Kickstarter is all reward, no risk, since nobody has to pay if the project isn't completely funded. But does the idea scale?

On the website Snack Bar Games, writer Graham Russell suggested in an editorial that top-tier publishers like Capcom and Nintendo should use the crowdfunding site as a metric to measure fan interest in games they're unsure about releasing in the U.S.

But publisher Xseed Games, which specializes in releasing niche Japanese games like Corpse Party and The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, says it's not that easy.

"As a publisher that acquires rights to publish games developed and owned by other companies, it would be extremely difficult for us to use Kickstarter effectively," said Xseed Director of Publishing Ken Berry in an e-mail to Wired.com.

"It would be extremely difficult for us to use Kickstarter effectively."In order to strike a licensing deal, Berry says, Xseed first confirms the availability of a given title and then puts down money as an upfront guarantee. If Xseed were to use Kickstarter, it would have to ask the IP holder to sit on the license to see if Xseed could raise funds for the project.

"Not only does this come across as being very unprofessional, it also eliminates any risk we would have had by putting up an upfront minimum guarantee ourselves," Berry said. "While that may seem like a blessing that we have no risk on our side, the main benefit to the licensor is that the licensee is willing to take on all the risk since they are guaranteed a certain amount of money no matter how poorly the title sells."

In other words, the IP holder lowers its rewards in exchange for lower risk, letting Xseed do the gambling.

"If the licensor sees that the risk can be easily overcome by using Kickstarter, they would be much more inclined to publish it themselves rather than licensing it out," Berry said.

There's also the risk that a Kickstarter project could meet its goal and Xseed could use the money to sign a deal only to have unforeseen circumstances lead to things falling apart at the last minute, says Xseed senior editor Jessica Chavez.

"Things like this happen and we wouldn’t want fans, especially after such a show of support, to be disappointed," she said in an e-mail. "Or angry. Or to send us painstakingly handwritten notes suggesting unpleasant things that might be done to us with blunt and/or sharp objects."

When asked by Wired.com if it would ever consider using Kickstarter, publisher Sega said it had no comment. Several other game publishers did not respond to Wired.com's inquiries.

For the time being, it would seem that Kickstarter's version of crowdfunding might not work for big business. But without a website like Kickstarter, many unique game ideas by young upstarts might have never made it past the drawing board. BlindSide's Rasmussen says the site has been nothing short of fantastic.

"The whole experience has been overwhelmingly positive," he said. "Our contact with the Kickstarter staff has been great [and] the community as a whole is genuinely interested in supporting creative projects."