Shadow of the Eternals Kickstarter falls short

The Shadow of the Eternals crowdfunding campaign has ended unsuccessfully. The campaign to create a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem had set a $750,000 goal, but only managed to bring in $323,950 before its funding period ended Friday night.

This was actually the second unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign for the project. The original, which had a $1.5 million goal and was run concurrently on Kickstarter and developer Precursor Games' own website, was cancelled in June after raising less than $300,000 three weeks into its five week campaign.

At the time, Precursor said it was halting the campaign due to "exciting new developments." It re-launched the crowdfunding effort in July to reflect those developments, specifically an external funding agreement that allowed them to lower the funding target to $750,000, and a stand-alone format for the game instead of the originally pitched episodic approach.

The Shadow of the Eternals campaign was met with much skepticism given a number of developments surrounding Precursor Games chief creative officer Denis Dyack in recent years. The founder of defunct Eternal Darkness maker Silicon Knights, Dyack had kept a low profile since the studio's multiple rounds of layoffs after making the critical and commercial flop X-Men Destiny. A report after Destiny's release featured former employees accusing Dyack of diverting resources from the X-Men project to work on an Eternal Darkness 2 demo. Dyack eventually addressed the accusations, saying he had kept silent because he didn't think anyone would believe them.

Around the same time, Silicon Knights lost a years-long legal battle with Epic Games in which the Unreal engine maker accused the developer of trying to steal its technology for use in its own games. Finally, in between the two crowdfunding campaigns, one of Precursor's founding developers was arrested on child pornography charges.