Barely a week goes by these days without a veteran game designer taking to Kickstarter to seek funding for their dream project.

But while Tim Schafer and Double Fine found themselves inundated with big-money pledges, less well-known developers have had more difficulty.

Enter Jordan Weisman, CEO of Harebrained Schemes and creator of the 1989 Shadowrun pen and paper RPG, which has since spawned a number of videogames.

His iOS debut was Crimson: Steam Pirates, published by Bungie in late 2011, but he also worked on MechWarrior, Shadowrun and Crimson Skies during his time at Microsoft. 

Weisman has taken to Kickstarter and asked Shadowrun fans to support a fresh videogame adaptation - a 2D turn-based RPG for PC, Android tablets, and the iPad, with social elements.

The return
Shadowrun Returns is off to an excellent start, and has already amassed more than $97,000 worth of pledges from over 2,100 backers (at time of writing).

It needs $400,000 by 29 April to reach its funding target.

It would seem that licensing issues have foiled previous attempts to revive the franchise, but Weisman has now regained the licence to the game he created 23 years ago.

As the project's Kickstarter page explains, "The restraints on the licence from Microsoft made it impossible to get established publishers interested in Shadowrun and so it remained just a dream for a long time until Jordan saw the recent successes of some other veteran designers on Kickstarter."

Continued erosion

"Crowd sourcing to fund creative content represents truly profound change to the status quo," continues the project decription's bold pronouncement.

"While we watch financial models for the creation and distribution of creative content continue to erode, Kickstarter charts a direction for how fans can directly impact development of creative content they want by funding its creation."