It Only Took Minutes for Fans to Crowdfund a 'Wonderful 101' Revival

Kickstarter—and crowdfunding more generally—has fallen out of favor with games in recent years. What once seemed like an exciting way to fund ideas that wouldn’t otherwise exist has soured after scores of games showed up late and many of them weren’t any good. But some ideas can still work, and Bayonetta developer PlatinumGames is taking a chance by trying to fund a Switch port of their early Wii U game, The Wonderful 101, on Kickstarter.

As of this writing, it’d already blown past the game’s initial stretch goal. It’s happening.

In The Wonderful 101, players controlled a group of superheroes who followed the player’s main hero around. It had a very Pikmin vibe.

Platinum is only asking for $50,000 to deliver a Switch version of The Wonderful 101 in April (!!), which suggests the game is basically already done. For people who worry that backing a crowdfunding project means months (or years) of delays, there’s good reason to believe this is, functionally, a pre-order for The Wonderful 101 on Switch and to spur interest and budget for the other versions Platinum wants to make for both Steam and PlayStation 4.

The stretch goals for the Steam and PlayStation 4 versions are $250,000 and $500,000 respectively. (In an interview, The Wonderful 101 designer Hideki Kamiya mentioned an Xbox stretch goal.) Other goals are teased in an image, but it’s unclear what they’re for.

Oh, and if you want to join the legions of people who’ve been blocked on Twitter by Kamiya? You only need to pledge $100 for the privilege.

The port, according to an interview with Gematsu, would actually be an improved version of The Wonderful 101, and could include new content if enough people are interested in it.

“We felt it did not quite reach the audience that it deserved,” said Kamiya. “As creators we are very confident in the game. This project is a unique opportunity to bring the fans together and see how far the game can go, which is why we went the crowdfunding route. We did speak with Nintendo about it initially, but they said, ‘you either do it only with us or do it yourselves.’”

It should be noted Platinum is reportedly, according to the same Gematsu interview, working on these versions of The Wonderful 101 in partnership with Dangen Entertainment, a Japanese indie publisher that recently found itself at the center of "allegations of harassment and other inappropriate behavior" and "disputes between Dangen and the developers behind two of its published games," per a report by USgamer. Dangen is not, however, listed on the Kickstarter page itself.

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