[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]hree years ago Cyberpunk action-RPG Project Lodus launched on Kickstarter. The team behind the game, then known as Leviathan Interactive, sought funding to get a vertical slice demo to show off to potential publishers to pick up the title. A month later they managed to just sneak by the $50,000 goal by the width of a proverbial hair. But, what’s been happening since? Not a lot apparently.

During the campaign itself they were relatively active in the comments section and sent out semi-regular updates, but as some projects have been known to do for various reasons Project Lodus has gone dark for months on end several times. It’s not unheard of for project creators to forget to update their backers from time to time due to being heavily engrossed in their work but from the look of things the tale is a lot more morbid than most.

Project Lodus

Why has it taken nearly three years to get just a small portion of Project Lodus ready to sell to potential investors? They did do some work on it and while the demo itself has not been completed they did release a video with in-game assets in one of the updates. It didn’t stop backers from complaining over the lack of updates and transparency, though.

Back in June 2013 the team went to E3 to show off what they did have to publishers but none were interested enough to pick it up. And to this day none have. For five months they went dark again and only then it was to apologize for the lack of updates and news. By then they had already gone through all of the backers’ money and were forced to take on side jobs to “pay the bills”. Which made the development on Project Lodus suffer.

By July 2014, two years after the campaign ran, they finally released some screenshots and the video mentioned above. And still without an estimated release date for the final vertical slice. By then a good number of backers had written Project Lodus off as either a scam or such a poorly maintained campaign that they just stopped caring.

Fast forward another six months or so, in January of this year Garrett Schultz had to finally come clean with the state of Project Lodus. Development of the game had been put on indefinite hold due to the lack of a publisher to pick it up. They had focused so much on getting this one title off the ground that with the exception of a second game that they were brought on to do for another company, codenamed “Project Illuminate”, that they pretty much did nothing during the three years the demo was in development.

Project Lodus

Despite having the Kickstarter be purely for a tech demo, one of the tiers most asked for by the backers was one for the full game. And this is one case where they should not have listened and never offered a tier with it. Still, Garrett was willing to do right and give everyone owed a copy of Project Lodus a copy of Project Illuminate in its stead. Whenever that one sees the light of day, that is.


Have any news or updates regarding Project Lodus you’d like to share?  Let us know in the comments, forums, or drop us a line!

Know of other Kickstarter projects that have just dropped off the map?  Want us to do some digging and see what’s going on?  Comment below, or shoot us an email and we’ll start nosing around.

Read more Kickstarter MIA articles right here for more sad crowdfunding tales.

About the Author

Serena Nelson

Serena has been a gamer since an early age and was brought up with the classic adventure games by Sierra On-Line, LucasArts, and Infocom. She's been an active member on Kickstarter since early 2012 and has backed a large number of crowdfunded games, mostly adventures. You can also find her writing for Kickstart Ventures and evn.moe.

View All Articles