There, he spent years working on Freelancer, a spiritual successor to Wing Commander, which was eventually released years behind schedule and was far from a blockbuster. He followed that success by starting his own studio, Digital Anvil, with Microsoft as an investor. Roberts first gained fame with his early 1990s hit Wing Commander, a space combat series that grossed over $400 million and featured Hollywood stars like Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. But in the world of consoles and controllers, he is Keith Richards: an aging rock star who can still get fans to reach into their pockets. If you don’t play video games, you probably have never heard of Roberts. Many high-profile crowdfunded projects, like the Pebble smartwatch ($43.4 million raised) and the Ouya video game console ($8.6 million), have failed miserably. Federal bureaucrats and state lawyers have intervened only in a few egregious situations where there was little effort to make good and a lot of the money was pocketed by the promoters. Creatives are in charge here, not profit-driven bean counters or deadline-enforcing suits. The heedless waste is fueled by easy money raised through crowdfunding, a Wild West territory nearly free of regulators and rules. This is not fraud-Roberts really is working on a game-but it is incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale. But for $1,650 it could be yours, right away. Eventually the Kraken, like all the starships that Roberts sells, will be playable in Star Citizen. While his underlings scramble to get the demo running again, a practiced Roberts smoothly fills minutes of dead air by screening a commercial for the Kraken, a massive war machine spaceship. Applause quickly turns to laughter when the game promptly crashes. The demo starts small: Seeing through the eyes of the in-game character, the player wakes up in his living quarters, gets up and brews a cup of coffee. They roar as the 50-year-old Englishman jumps onto the stage and a big screen lights up with the latest test version of Star Citizen. But despite the disappointments and delays, this crowd is cheering for Roberts.
But after seven years of work, no one-least of all Roberts-has a clue as to when it will be done. An epic sci-fi fantasy, Star Citizen was supposed to be finished in 2014. Most of the people here helped to pay for the game’s development-on average, $200 each, although some backers have given thousands. It’s October 2018 and 2,000 video game fanatics are jammed into Austin’s Long Center for the Performing Arts to get a glimpse of Star Citizen, the sprawling online multiplayer game being made by legendary designer Chris Roberts.
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