James Pond Kickstarter is scrapped

The attempt to crowdfund a return for the James Pond IP has been scrapped.

The project, fronted by one of the game’s original devs Chris Sorrell, was Kickstarted last month by rights holder Gameware Europe.

However, with just 11 days to go it had raised just 16,000 of its 100,000 target – a figure low enough to cause the developers to abandon hope, they claim.

Today after much discussion and thought we made the difficult decision to end our campaign early,” an update said.” Although we have 12 days to go it’s clear that we aren’t going to make our 100,000 goal, so instead of pretending otherwise and continuing the updates we’ve decided to be honest with ourselves and with you and stop.

We came into this with little game to show. We appreciate we were asking for a lot of faith from you guys, and our mantra from the start has always been to keep the game design as open as possible, with the fans calling the shots. This was a risk, and it didn’t work out, but I will say a huge thank you to everyone who pledged.”

As is seemingly always the way with these things, the team has vowed to return for a second effort.

Added Gameware: The campaign wasn’t the success we’d hoped for. This was for a few reasons, all of which we plan on addressing and then making a come back with a new, stronger campaign!

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from running this campaign it’s that there sure is still a lot of love for this plucky secret agent fish and we believe it’ll only take the right game and the right campaign to make James Pond 4 a reality. So stay tuned and we will be back with more news soon.”