It’s been more than one year since veteran game designer Jordan Weisman and his company, Harebrained Schemes, raised more than $1.8 million on Kickstarter to develop new versions of Shadowrun Returns for tablets and PCs, which blew past the original goal of $400,000.
And now we know when gamers can finally start playing. Originally slated for a June release, the studio announced today a July 25 debut as Harebrained fixes some bugs and polishes up the game.
The company also announced today that Shadowrun Returns will feature a game editor that allows anyone to change of parts of the game or even completely remake the existing campaign.
Weisman said that he got the idea after working with Trent Reznor on the Alternate Reality Game for Reznor’s album Year Zero.
“Trent empowered his fans to re-mix his music anyway they wished by releasing the GarageBand tracks with the album,” Weisman said in a statement. “With Shadowrun Returns we are doing the same thing, players can start from what we have created and build on it, revise it, or use it as a starting point for completely new stories. I believe we are the first to release an editable version of an entire campaign, and we are excited to see where the players take this universe.”
Set in a ravaged Seattle 2054, the game is a revival of the classic Shadowrun role-playing game that debuted back in 1989. It will be available Windows PC, Mac, iOS and Android.
“It’s a mashup of science fiction and fantasy,” Weisman said during a gameplay demo released in March. “It’s a dystopian cyperpunk future in to which magic has re-awakened and brought with it the races and creatures of fantasy.”
Weisman, a Seattle-based serial entrepreneur, is known for startups including FASA, Virtual World Entertainment, Wizkids, 42 Entertainment, and Smith & Tinker. Along with other members of the Harebrained team, he was the public face of the company’s Kickstarter campaign, clearly having fun in their regular video updates as the pledges continued to roll in.
Previously on GeekWire: Game over? Heavily-funded iPad device maker Discover Bay Games vanishes without explanation
