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When Crowdfunding Goes Wrong: The Disastrous Tale of a Gore Video Game Featuring Chucky

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When Crowdfunding Goes Wrong: The Disastrous Tale of a Gore Video Game Featuring Chucky
Randy Meeks

Randy Meeks

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The 80s and 90s were the perfect breeding ground for psychokiller movies. With the culmination of the cold war and a boom state in the United States, filmmakers knew that a mutant or monster wasn’t scary enough. They had to strike where they could do the most damage to American society: the welfare state. Freddy Krueger was born from the dream, Jason Voorhees from summer camps, Michael Myers from children’s celebration… and Chucky from capitalism itself turned against you.

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Child’s Play was released in 1988 and grossed 44 million at the time (about 115 million with inflation), kicking off a new slasher saga that, by now, has six sequels, a reboot and a TV series that continues the movies. It was to be expected, then, that sooner or later a video game would arrive that would do justice to Chucky. After all, this killer doll is always profitable, isn’t it?

May 2011. TikGames, an indie games company that has published versions of Monopoly, dominoes or Mahjong for computers and consoles, announces a crowdfunding with the conviction that they will succeed. ‘Chucky: Wanna Play?’ was a playable version of ‘Child’s Play’ for which they needed an extra $925,000. They already had $500,000 and the rights, but they needed more to make a game that was really worthwhile.

A year and a half later, in October 2012, a Kickstarter appeared promising a hack-n-slash starring Chucky. A gore-filled adventure in which the doll would kill random victims in all the absurd and creative ways you can imagine, including slashing them in the face. You may be wondering why we’re not telling you anything about the plot. Well: of the $925,000 they were asking for they got… 585 from 19 people. Oops.

Crowdfunding doll

One can assume that in TikGames were not very happy with the result and they themselves canceled the Kickstarter and the game, whose demo was lost until it appeared for Xbox 360 emulators. The studio went on to do other things like ‘Scarygirl’, published by Square and rumored to have a movie sooner or later, or the games starring emojis ‘DurantEmoji’ and ‘ZaynMoji’.

For his part, Chucky did get his own game in 2013, although, of course, it was most disappointing: a simple ‘Temple run’ with the doll as the protagonist titled ‘Slash & Dash’ in which you could kill security guards using knives, screwdrivers, hooks or hammers. For whatever reason, it was neither liked nor did it ever live up to the original saga.

Luckily, children’s least favorite doll had better luck in the world of comics and amusement parks. Who knows? If Jason could have had his contemporary version to play with various friends/victims, why would we discriminate against a doll… no matter how diabolical?

Randy Meeks

Randy Meeks

Editor specializing in pop culture who writes for websites, magazines, books, social networks, scripts, notebooks and napkins if there are no other places to write for you.

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