Omni ZoetropeHave you ever wondered what the classic Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now would be like as a video game?
Well, you won’t have to wonder much longer, as director Francis Ford Coppola is bringing his classic work to the digital world through an ambitious Kickstarter campaign that needs $900k.
Coppola is producing the game through the production company he founded with some guy called George Lucas – American Zoetrope.
While Coppola won’t be too heavily involved with the project, he will work with a team of hand-picked developers, and there’s quite a crew.
Montgomery Markland, producer of Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera will be directing, while executive producing duties will be taken up by Lawrence Liberty, who produced both Fallout: New Vegas and The Witcher.
Head writer is Rob Auten, who lent his pen to Gears of War: Judgement and Battlefield: Hardline, while Obsidian Entertainment’s design director Josh Sawyer will also lend a hand.
But how will the game itself play? It’s been described as an ‘immersive, psychedelic horror RPG’ that stars Captain Benjamin Willard on a mission to assassinate the rogue Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who’s decided to go AWOL and start his own sovereign nation with the men under his command.
In true survival horror fashion (and as it would be in a real war), we’ll have to get by with extremely limited supplies. As the team stress, ‘this is not Call of Duty in Vietnam’.
The developer explains:
Unlike a traditional RPG, the emphasis is not choosing dialogue, but rather actions and postures. Combat draws from survival horror to emphasize combat avoidance and stealth.
If Apocalypse Now does meet its Kickstarter goal (it’s currently at $47,000 with 29 days to go), we can expect it some time in 2020.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.