Apocalypse Now video game comes to Kickstarter via Francis Ford Coppola
By the devs behind Fallout: New Vegas, Wasteland 2, and The Witcher.
Francis Ford Coppola's seminal Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now is getting a video game adaptation.
Or at least it will should it raise $900k on Kickstarter.
Coppola is directly producing this through the production company he founded with George Lucas, American Zoetrope.
That doesn't mean that he'll be the one making it. He's leaving that to the game development professionals, and he's amassed quite the pedigree for the project. On directing duties there's Montgomery Markland, producer of Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera. Executive producing will be Lawrence Liberty, who produced both Fallout: New Vegas and The Witcher. And the head writer is Rob Auten, who co-wrote Gears of War: Judgement and Battlefield: Hardline. Even Obsidian Entertainment's design director Josh Sawyer will be pitching in.
As for the game itself, Apocalypse Now will be "an immersive, psychedelic horror RPG" following the exploits of the American Captain Benjamin Willard after he's tasked with assassinating the rogue Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who has gone AWOL and started his own sovereign nation with the men under his command. The horror. The horror.
Players will have to get crafty in this most horrific of war stories, as they'll be given precious few resources. Instead, you'll have to scrape by off limited food, water, anti-malaria medicine, gasoline, first-aid supplies, guns and ammo.
"Unlike a traditional RPG, the emphasis is not choosing dialogue, but rather actions and postures. Combat draws from survival horror to emphasize combat avoidance and stealth," the developer wrote. "This is not Call of Duty in Vietnam."
This won't just be a survival-horror shooter, however, as the way you interact with your comrades will affect how they view you and their willingness to offer help.
Hints of the Apocalypse Now game were leaked way back in 2010, and indeed that was the same game with Markland's company Killspace tied to the project, though it's unclear how much the game has changed in the seven years since.
You can reserve the Apocalypse Now game by pledging $25, though the price will increase to $35 after the first thousand of these are claimed.
The full game isn't expected to launch until sometime around October 2020.