The Most Insane Video Game Ever Made Is Finally Getting A Sequel

I usually do my best to avoid writing about crowdfunding campaigns. Like any self-respecting technology journalist, doing so brings up a lot of unpleasant emotions, chief among them the uncomfortable realization that I'm playing my own small part in the overarching hype machine of the modern tech industry.

But here I am, barely able to contain my excitement about a new video game Kickstarter project I saw this morning. And even worse, I don't even want to explain why this particular Kickstarter is so exciting because that could ruin the entire glorious experience that is Frog Fractions. But that game was crazy enough that I'm not entirely convinced that creator Jim Crawford is actually planning to use Kickstarter for its intended purpose. Really, he could just be messing with us all again in an even more deviously clever way.

Suffice to say, the Kickstarter in question is asking for $60,000 to make a sequel to a video game that was first "released" in 2012. I put that in scare quotes, because Frog Fractions is, at first glance, the most basic kind of video game imaginable. As the name suggests, it's partly a Math Blasters-esque work of edutainment. And it was posted online for free, asking only that players have a browser compatible with Adobe Flash.

But there was a lot more to Frog Fractions than a Flash game like Helicopter. You start the game as a frog, perched on a lilypad catching bugs as they fly by to make the titular fractions. Pretty soon, however, the game starts to get weird. Really weird. Like, existential mindfuck weird. I really don't want to say anything else because it's the rare kind of experience that actually shouldn't be spoiled. So if you haven't played Frog Fractions yet, just go check it out. And one tip: look underwater.

After finishing a game like Frog Fractions, however, I'm left wondering how anybody can top something like that. Clearly the first game didn't take much to produce, so $60K could be a reasonable budget to build out a sequel. Exorbitant even. Plus, it's already amassed more than $20,000 with 29 days to go, so it's likely that the game will pass its funding threshold. But how does more money make for a weirder, more ambitious game? The mainstream AAA game industry is proof enough that that's not the case.

Thankfully, the Kickstarter for Frog Fractions shows Crawford hasn't lost his sense of humor. In the pitch for the game, he said that he's leaving Frog Fractions 2 deliberately vague. "Most Kickstarters are very detailed about what you're paying for, but the nature of this one is that you're paying for a surprise."

Crawford added that he first created Frog Fractions "explicitly to evoke the air of mystery that all video games held in the 1980s." He's hoping that "Frog Fractions 2 will evoke that same feeling even more strongly."

I am too.