Feargus Urquhart was freaking out.

He and his team at Obsidian Entertainment were about to take one of the biggest steps in the company's history—launching a Kickstarter for a brand new video game—but something was wrong. The button to start up their crowdfunding page had turned grey. Nobody could click it. And the Kickstarter was supposed to launch in just thirty minutes.

Luckily for Urquhart, he had contact information for Cindy Au, Kickstarter's community director, who he had chatted up extensively to prepare for their game-changing project. Au said it was a hiccup in the system, and sure enough, after just a few minutes it was fixed. The button re-appeared.

They clicked it. Waited a few seconds. Then hit refresh. They'd already made $2,000.

Fans have always oscillated between loving and hating Obsidian. They were warming to the game company again.

'DragonPlay Sounded Lame'

You might think of Obsidian Entertainment as a mistreated genius, a talented group of game-makers responsible for unappreciated gems like Alpha Protocol and Neverwinter Nights 2. Or maybe you don't have much faith in their development skills after the buggy Fallout: New Vegas and the unfinished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. Either way, their story is undeniably fascinating.

The story of Obsidian—a story of heartbreaking failures and record-shattering successes—begins with a company called Interplay, a game developer and publisher best known for games like Wasteland and Descent. Interplay's execs were looking to expand their role-playing game division, and in 1996, they found a young game developer named Feargus Urquhart (pronounced "FUR-gus URK-heart") to take the steering wheel.

"I was put in charge of it when I was 26," Urquhart told me as we sat in his office in sunny Irvine, California earlier this month. Urquhart, Obsidian's CEO and one of five co-founders, spent an afternoon chatting with me about his company's culture and history—which began with that small division at Interplay.

"They wanted to call it DragonPlay, and I just thought DragonPlay sounded lame," Urquhart said, laughing. "They were looking for something-Play I guess. The joke was always that the adult version of Interplay would be..."

He paused for a few seconds, waiting for me to get it. I didn't.

"Foreplay!"

Clearly that wouldn't work. So they called it Black Isle—after a Scottish landmark of the same name—and under Urquhart's leadership, the studio cranked out a number of isometric RPGs that people grew to love. Black Isle's resumé included heavy-hitters like Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout 2. The company also helped publish the BioWare-developed Baldur's Gate and its sequel, generally considered two of the best role-playing games ever made.

Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart has been running the company since it was founded in 2003.

But by 2000, their parent company Interplay was in trouble. Cash trouble.

"We did fine," Urquhart said. "Our product made lots of money, and internally, the BioWare stuff made even more money. It was great, Black Isle. We were doing well."

But Interplay wasn't. "Whether it was probably some transitional stuff or some bets that just didn't pay off," Urquhart said, Black Isle's parent company was in a bad place. And as a result of their financial hardships, Interplay lost the license to Dungeons & Dragons—a license that had been used for almost every Black Isle game so far.

This made things difficult for Urquhart's team. They'd already sunk a great deal of time into Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound—the details of which are well-documented—and now they couldn't do a thing with the D&D-packed code and ideas they'd created.

"It was unfortunate because we loved working on D&D games," Urquhart said. "We'd been working on Baldur's Gate III for about a year, a year and a half, and so that happened... That kinda pushed us out the door."

(Baldur's Gate III would be revisited again several years later, but again, it never got off the ground.)

Interplay didn't seem like a viable option anymore, Urquhart said. So he and some of the team started to think about moving on.

"We were like you know what, we're still in our early 30s," he said. "If there's a time to start a company before we get to be old and 40, then this is the time to do it."

He recruited a bunch of fellow developers: Chris Avellone, Chris Jones, Chris Parker, and Darren Monahan, all of whom became co-founders of the new company. A company called Obsidian Entertainment.

Walls of Fart Clouds

Obsidian's studio, located on the second floor of a modern building in downtown Irvine, is sleek and swanky, full of board games, couches, and high-definition television sets. Individual offices are plastered with funny pictures and game sketches. It's impossible not to stop and stare at some of the ridiculous animation and attack drawings from South Park: The Stick of Truth, the RPG that Obsidian will release this coming spring. Not a lot of offices would let their employees hang up sketches of vibrating dildo swords and fart clouds. Here, it's work.

The company has an impressive collection of board games to distract them from actual work.

The office is generally sectioned off by game, so it's currently broken up into three divisions: One for South Park, one for their Kickstartered game Project: Eternity, and one for an unannounced game that's still in the very early stages of production.

As we walk through the halls, Urquhart shows me some of their coolest artifacts: a soda machine that distributes beverages via scary robotic claw; a customized Obsidian arcade machine that's currently broken; Shattered Steel lunchboxes and Baldur's Gate flasks. We pass Josh Sawyer, a tall, heavily-tattooed game designer who led development on RPGs like Icewind Dale II and Neverwinter Nights 2.

"This is Josh Sawyer's office," Urquhart tells me. He points to a set of hanging dolls above the designer's desk. "And those are his Teletubbies."

"They're not Teletubbies!" Sawyer yells. "They're Pikmin!"

Urquhart laughs heartily. He's a jovial, infectiously energetic man, and I get the impression he spends a lot of time bouncing from office to office, shmoozing and goofing around with his employees. He chuckles and jokes as we pass fellow Obsidianites in the halls. He almost seems too nice to be in charge of a video game studio.

Spreading Their Wings

The first thing Urquhart did, once Obsidian Entertainment turned from idea to registered company, was reach out to game publishers to see who might want to give some cash to the newly-formed independent studio. Before they could start making games, Obsidian needed money.

They talked to EA. "I forgot what we talked to EA about," Urquhart said.

They talked to Ubisoft. "We almost did a Might & Magic game," Urquhart said. It didn't happen: Ubisoft instead contracted a company called Arkane Studios (best known for this year's hit Dishonored) to make Dark Messiah of Might & Magic—probably, Urquhart said, because both Ubisoft and Arkane are French.

"I call [Ubisoft] every year and I say ‘Hey, we'd love to make you a Might & Magic game," Urquhart said. "And they go, ‘We know.'"

Obsidian also talked to Take-Two about a game they called Futureblight. "We were gonna look at using the Neverwinter Nights engine to do a Fallout game," Urquhart said. "We thought that would be cool."

That one came close to reality, but instead wound up a casualty of the console transition cycle. "In 2003, people were very worried about where the PC was going and stuff like that," Urquhart said. "And—not that Xbox was coming to its end, but now everyone knew that there was gonna be another Xbox." So Take-Two passed.

Then they got a call from Simon Jeffrey, who was then president of LucasArts. He wanted to talk about making a video game.

"We actually talked to him about doing sort of an action-RPG Star Wars game, which I always thought would be cool to do—like a little party-based action-RPG, with first-person lightsabers and R2D2. It'd be fun. I still think it'd be cool to do," Urquhart said.

"He said, ‘Well I think that's a cool idea, but what do you think about doing Knights of the Old Republic II?'"

It seemed like the perfect fit. The first KOTOR, developed by BioWare, had done well for LucasArts—well enough that they wanted a sequel by Christmas 2004. BioWare wanted to work on new games, and Obsidian's developers were familiar with the KOTOR technology, so in late 2003, the deal was struck. Obsidian would have 15 months to get the game out for a 2004 holiday release.

Turned out 15 months wasn't quite long enough.

Knights of the Unfinished Republic

This July, almost eight years after Knights of the Old Republic II was released, modders finished their quest to complete the game. Everything that had been left out, they put back in.

Although KOTOR II was released in December 2004, it was never quite finished. Deadline restrictions forced Obsidian to remove a great deal of content—planets, scenes, and plot points were all left on the cutting room floor. Crafty modders would later find and restore this content, as Obsidian left it in the game's source code, but back in 2004, it was all just scrapped.

So why was it all cut?

"What happened was—and as a lot of these things happen, no one means anything nefarious, no one means anything badly or anything like that—what happened was we were on the track to get done for Christmas, and the game was looking really good," Urquhart told me. "I think there was some surprise within LucasArts that we were doing as good a job as we were. I think there were some parts of LucasArts that were worried that ‘Oh, this new developer and they're gonna fuck it up like all new developers fuck everything up.'

"And so in early 2004 they took a look and they were like, ‘Wow!' Their QA was playing it, and they were like, ‘This has a lot of potential: let's move it out, let's give it time.' So they moved it out to the next year."

Urquhart was perfectly fine with that decision, and he changed the project's schedule to reflect that new 2005 release date. But he forgot the cardinal rule of dealing with executives: make sure everything's in writing.

"On our side we didn't make sure that we had the contract changed," Urquhart said. "And then post-E3 I think financially something happened—I don't know what it was. And we got the call and they said it has to be done for Christmas... Again, I don't think this is anything nefarious, it just happened. Some of the onus is on us: we didn't get the contract changed. So we had to make this decision: get in trouble or get it done."

As a new developer, they wanted to make sure their publisher was happy so they could all work together again, Urquhart said. So Obsidian sucked it up. They went through the game and cut out what they could, including a ton of scenes, some quests, and even an entire area—the droid planet M4-78. They also didn't have enough time to do proper bug testing, although Urquhart thinks people have been rather harsh on Knights of the Old Republic II over the years.

"When I talk about KOTOR II through the sands of time, some people are like, "Well, I heard that KOTOR II crashed every six seconds," Urquhart said. "No, it didn't crash every six seconds. It's perfectly playable. For a vast majority of it, it's practically bug free.

"My favorite e-mail that I ever got from someone was like, ‘I just wanna tell you how angry I am about the ending of KOTOR II. After my third playthrough, I just feel...'"

Urquhart laughed. "I'm like... if you played through three times, it couldn't have been that bad!"

The Snow White Spin-Off That Wasn't

In late 2004, as they were finishing up on KOTOR II, Obsidian got a call from the folks at Atari, the company that had snatched Dungeons & Dragons license after Interplay lost it. Atari had released Neverwinter Nights in 2002. Now they wanted to do a sequel. Urquhart was happy to oblige.

By 2005, Obsidian was stable and doing well. Despite their issues with KOTOR II, the company had grown to some 50-something employees, and Urquhart was talking with multiple publishers about making all sorts of games.

One of those publishers was Disney, who enlisted Obsidian to design a video game prequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Tentatively called Dwarves, it would be a third-person action game for Xbox 360 and PS3 that focused on Snow White's seven companions. There would be a whole new story, and at the end, you'd banish the antagonist to Snow White's iconic magical mirror.

"It was a lot of fun," Urquhart said. "We feel we turned in a really cool prototype. We worked on it for about a year. It's one of the games here that the team just loved working on. And unfortunately—which, it happens in this industry—you have changes of focus at a publisher."

Those changes of focus were caused by a CEO change, which led to a total shift of direction. Suddenly Disney was no longer interested in doing a Snow White prequel. Snow White was untouchable, they said. The game was cancelled.

It was a heartbreaking experience that Obsidian—just like many other video game developers—would grow quite familiar with over the coming years. Games are always ephemeral. Publishers are constantly changing their minds about where to throw their money, and gaming trends tend to ebb and flow on a monthly basis. So independent developers like Obsidian have to stay scrappy. They have to juggle as many balls as possible, knowing that most of them will hit the ground.

"We put a lot of challenges in front of us," Urquhart said. "It's this interesting thing, I think, as an independent studio. And I'll give anybody this advice that I can. When somebody offers you something as an independent studio, you take it. You take it, because it's feast or famine. That's what we've found."

Over the next few months, Obsidian found themselves with something of a feast. While they were wrapping up work on Neverwinter Nights 2 in late 2005, Urquhart got a call from Sega's people, who were looking for a brand new original RPG. Problem was, Obsidian was all tied up. They had nobody available to work on a new game.

"[Sega was] like, ‘Why don't you come up with a concept and we'll negotiate a contract and when you're available it'll all be done?'" Urquhart said. "And we were like, ‘Ummm we're fine doing that... you don't feel it's a waste of time?' And they're like, ‘Yeah.'"

So they came up with a concept: spy RPG. They came up with a name: Alpha Protocol. And they came up with a main character, Michael Thorton, a superspy as suave as James Bond, as savvy as Jason Bourne, and as badass as Jack Bauer.

"[Sega] loved it," Urquhart said. "They said, ‘Hey, this is different. It's not dragons, it's not phasers.' You don't see a lot of spy RPGs. Sometimes we go: maybe there's a reason for that!"

And indeed, Urquhart admits that Alpha Protocol had some serious issues. The game's four-year development process was long and arduous, and the team sometimes felt like they didn't have a clear direction: was it a shooter? An RPG? A stealth game? All three?

"We meandered—I think that's the best way to say it," Urquhart said. "We meandered for quite a while on that project. It took us a long time to get to the point where we were where we needed to be."

They didn't have any sort of game specification document, Urquhart said, which is now something they require for all of their games: a listed, documented set of guidelines for exactly how a game will be designed and developed. They also didn't determine exactly who they were making the game for—action players? RPG fans? shooter addicts?—which Urquhart said was a serious detriment.

"We started getting into these arguments which were completely not helpful," he said. "Is it 70% RPG or 30% action, or is it 46% action and 50%... These things were not helpful. What we needed to say is: in a mission, Michael can do these things, you know, and this is the toolkit. He can unlock things, he can hack things, he can throw bombs, he can interact this way, he can interact that way."

Part of the problem was Sega's indecision, Urquhart said. "A great example is there was a whole segment of the game, which was really cool, and it probably cost $500,000 to make. It was a long sequence, lots of mocap and all this kind of stuff. And at the time Sega felt it just didn't fit the game... and so $500,000 cut. And you know, I understand: they pay us to make the game. It's totally their right to do that. It can just derail."

When it came out in June 2010 (after several well-publicized delays), Alpha Protocol was slammed by critics. Reviewers thought it was buggy, messy, and directionless. The game didn't meet Sega's sales expectations, and plans for a sequel were shelved.

But against all odds, Alpha Protocol (one of whose characters stars in the above image) has somehow turned into an underground hit. For every negative review out there you'll find a hundred fans who love the game, who replay it over and over just to see how their choices impact every scene and ending.

"It's so weird to have this game where I can read a review and the poor game is whimpering in the corner and the press guy is just beating it," Urquhart said. "And I—we get e-mails. Just the other day, someone wrote a nice, very long e-mail about how they're playing through Alpha Protocol for the third or fourth time and they just love it... That is weird, to have a game in your career where it got reviewed poorly, but then it gets on all these lists. It's on these ‘Best games you've never played' lists or ‘Poorly-rated games you really should play' lists. And I always wonder: should I feel good about that?"

Sega has no interest in making a sequel right now—development was costly and challenging, Urquhart points out—but anything could change, particularly as word of mouth for Alpha Protocol continues to spread. "It sold okay," Urquhart said. "We don't know if they made money or lost money, but we do know—and that's the interesting thing—it keeps selling."

"Now, knowing everything we know now, we would love to do Alpha Protocol 2, and everybody here would love to work on it," he said. "[Because] we now know what it is and how to do it... I'm hoping maybe in even a couple of years, [Sega] will get to kind of a point where everybody has kind of moved on, and the baggage is swept away. People are still positive about the brand. We get asked [about a sequel] all the time, still. It's become a cult classic."

Alien Encounters

In 2006, as Neverwinter Nights 2 was finished and Alpha Protocol was just getting started, Obsidian was approached by three publishers at around the same time. One wanted to work with them on an "original fantasy RPG," Urquhart said. The other was EA, whose executives likely wanted a piece of the open-world RPG pie that had been recently popularized by The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. They asked Obsidian to make what Urquhart today describes as "a big Skyrim-type Ultima game."

The third was Sega, who wanted to work on another game with Urquhart and his team: a role-playing game based on Aliens. That's the one they went with, although you wouldn't know it from store shelves: the Aliens RPG was cancelled in 2009. (Some very cool concept art from the game is still floating around on the Internet, though.)

So what happened? Urquhart said they had a fantastic prototype—"The best vertical slice [Sega] had ever received"—but they couldn't quite turn it into a good enough game. One Friday night in February of 2009, they sent a build of the game to Sega's producers. On Monday morning, they got a call saying that the Aliens RPG was cancelled. Sega didn't even look at the prototype they'd sent.

"The saddest thing was, as we were turning over everything to them, our producer [at Sega] called Darren [Monahan], one of the other owners here, and he said, ‘My god you guys did a lot of work,'" Urquhart said.

"And we were like, well yeah."

Viva New Vegas

Just as Aliens was cancelled—and right after they'd finished both expansion packs to Neverwinter Nights 2—Urquhart got a call from Todd Vaughn, vice president of development at Bethesda. The folks there had just released Fallout 3, and their internal team was moving on to Skyrim. They had something else in mind for Obsidian.

"We've talked to the Bethesda guys more than once about doing games," Urquhart said. "They called me once about Star Trek, and I was probably being a little bit too much, too arrogant of a developer... This would've been like 2007—way before the movies—and it was like, Star Trek wasn't in a good place. I don't know what I said, but I now know it probably sounded arrogant."

This time, Bethesda wanted Obsidian to work on a franchise that Urquhart, Chris Taylor, and the rest of their team knew quite well: Fallout.

"They came to us and said, ‘We think it'd be cool if you did something on the West Coast,'" Urquhart said. "We were like, ‘Sure!'"

So Urquhart sat down one night with the other four owners and started to brainstorm. They decided that the game a heavy focus on factions, as per fan request. They immediately decided to set the game in Las Vegas. They even plotted out a rudimentary intro: "What could be more Vegas than starting off the game with you getting shot in the head and buried in the desert?"

Bethesda loved the treatment and immediately greenlit New Vegas, which Obsidian released in October 2010. It was well-received—and according to many critics and fans, better than Fallout 3—but it was also full of bugs. For some people the game was near-unplayable thanks to constant glitches and crashes. Many of the game's issues have since been patched, but for fans paying $60, New Vegas was unforgivable.

"The timeline was compressed," Urquhart said. "It was a timeline we agreed to—I think we bit off a little more than we could chew, and then it was a little hard to recover... We learned some lessons about trying to make too big a game. We also learned some lessons about managing QA."

They tried to apply those lessons to their next game, Dungeon Siege III, which had its own issues, but by most accounts was relatively bug-free. And after New Vegas, Urquhart decided it was time to shed their reputation.

"We as a company got into a big room and we said, ‘We are not gonna make buggy games anymore,'" Urquhart said.

So they designed an entirely new bug-tracking system—a computerized program that automatically sends crash reports to their engineers. Their last bug-recording system, Urquhart said, involved pens and paper.

"I think that's what people are gonna see from us from now on—they're not gonna see buggy products," he said. "I dunno what the exact count is, but we're a ways away from being done on South Park and we've already fixed 10,000 bugs."

"So would you want to make a (bug-free) sequel to New Vegas?" I asked.

"We would love to work on Fallout again," Urquhart said. "Hell, we would love to work in the Elder Scrolls universe. Nothing is going on at this point in time, but we talk about it all the time... I'd love to do a Fallout: New Vegas 2. I think a Fallout: New Vegas 2 would kick ass.

"I believe New Vegas is a great, like—you have Fallout, and then you have New Vegas. They feel like separate products. Same engine, same everything, but they feel totally different. ‘Sister product' is the best way to put it."

Matt and Trey

In October of 2009, Urquhart got an interesting call. It was Greg Kampanis, a vice president of content at South Park Digital Studios, the interactive branch of South Park. He said that Matt Stone and Trey Parker—South Park's co-creators, writers, directors, and voice actors—wanted to make a video game, and they wanted to meet with Obsidian to talk about it.

"I said, ‘Sure, I guess,'" Urquhart said, laughing. He agreed to set up a meeting, not sure exactly what to think.

"What was interesting was, [Kampanis] said, ‘Put something together about your company, but know that it isn't really for them, particularly for Trey, because he already knows all the stuff that you do.'"

So that's what they did: Urquhart put together a presentation of ideas, and when they all got together, he explained to Trey and Matt how Obsidian makes RPGs.

"I went through that very quickly, and [Trey's] like, ‘I got it. I love this stuff. I don't like that and this, that, and the other thing,'" Urquhart said.

Towards the end of the meeting, Urquhart turned to the two South Park creators and said, "Look: let's pretend we can do all the RPG stuff. We can handle that. If it doesn't look like the show, all of this is pointless."

Trey and Matt agreed.

"That's our job," Urquhart told them. "We need to go and make something that looks like the show."

So Urquhart got a team together and spent a week putting together a rudimentary prototype. They got the original South Park construction paper from the folks at South Park Digital Studios, and worked to turn it into a polygon-filled interactive experience.

"We showed it to [South Park Digital Studios]," Urquhart said. "They said, ‘That's totally on the right track, once you do a little bit more.'"

Obsidian wasn't getting paid at this point, but the prospect of a South Park RPG was hard to resist, so Urquhart agreed to keep plugging away at it. They built a prototype set in a house from the show. You played as a generic kid, and you could change your race or clothes by hitting the trigger buttons. If you walked into the living room, you could find Randy Marsh in his underwear, playing Guitar Hero. If you went to the kitchen, you could pick up a spatula, which would then transform into an axe that you could use to smash things.

It wasn't much, but it was the start of a game.

"We took it in to Matt and Trey," Urquhart said. "And Trey just grabs the controller and he's like, ‘This feels awesome!' And Matt runs up to the screen and he goes ‘That's the construction paper!' And they were like, ‘Let's do this." And that was that."

So they put together a contract and started working on the RPG. For a while, Obsidian worked directly for the South Park team with funding from their parent company, Viacom. But in late 2011, they decided to get a more experienced game publisher involved. A few companies showed interest. They ultimately went with THQ.

Not long afterwards, news came out that THQ was in dire straits. This was particularly tough for Obsidian, as they were reeling from the recent cancellation of a game they'd codenamed North Carolina, which forced the company to lay off 30 people earlier this year. For a while, all they could do was wait.

"Whenever you have to put people on the street it sucks," Urquhart said. "And so it's a big wait of like, what's gonna happen? Are they gonna pay, are they not gonna pay? So yeah, I was worried."

But the game is shaping up to be great. Diverging from the style of RPGs they'd developed in the past, Obsidian decided to go with turn-based combat for South Park—now called South Park: The Stick of Truth—and they spent a great deal of time working on creative attacks, spells, and summons that would fit the theme of the show. Trey and Matt wrote the entire script, which from what I've seen so far feels genuine and hilarious. And initial buzz for the game has been fantastic. Even if THQ tanks in the next few months, it's easy to imagine a publisher bidding war over who gets the rights to Stick of Truth.

The contrast between Obsidian at the end of 2012 and Obsidian at the beginning of 2012 is like night and day.

Next-Gen Cancellations

When I asked Urquhart about North Carolina—the cancelled project that led to significant layoffs at Obsidian earlier this year—he said he couldn't talk much about it. It was an original IP—a big, third-person, open-world game designed and created by Obsidian. They pitched it to several publishers in 2011, complete with a fancy book full of ideas and concept art. But Urquhart couldn't say much more than that.

"We went down the road with a few publishers," he said. "We did get it signed up with a publisher, and unfortunately as happens sometimes, projects just don't go. Particularly when it's been not that long, it's hard to go into a lot of detail about it. It's too bad—we thought it was really cool."

So the game was axed, and at the beginning of this year, Obsidian had to lay off a large team of people. (Earlier this year I reported that North Carolina was a first-party game for the next Xbox—codenamed Durango—and it was published by Microsoft. Urquhart wouldn't comment on whether that was true.)

Found in Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart's office: Baldur's Gate ale and Fallout gecko-in-a-can.

Games are cancelled. It happens. But for an independent developer like Obsidian, this has become a trend over the past decade: everyone spends a great deal of time and money on a video game that never actually makes it to reality.

Even today, as Obsidian seems to be in a comfortable position, they still have to stay scrappy to survive.

"As soon as we get back from the holidays, I'm on the road looking for the next thing," Urquhart said. "We're generally always pitching. Products that are working right now for our publishers might not work, and probably people don't know a lot about this aspect, but in general, all agreements that any developer signs with a publisher have this line called 'cancel for convenience.' We could get a call tomorrow saying, 'Yeah, we don't want to move forward with product X.'"

When that sort of thing happens, Obsidian will usually get a kill fee of some sort, but that's never enough to pay everyone for nine months—the amount of time that it usually takes to put together a new deal, Urquhart said.

"It's hard," he said. "That can be done with a 75-person team. Suddenly I have 75 people tomorrow that don't have work. What do we do and how do we handle it?"

In early 2012, things were rough for Obsidian and independent developers like them. But over the course of this year, something changed. Kickstarter might not be a revolution, but it's changed the game for companies like Obsidian. And Urquhart's team has been one of the year's most exciting success stories.

How To Make $4 Million In 30 Days

It's September 14, 2012. 10am Pacific. Obsidian is going crazy.

They've just launched the Kickstarter for Project: Eternity—an original, isometric RPG that they hope to develop over the next year and a half—and nobody at the office can focus on anything else. Fans are coming out in droves to support the project, donating money to help Obsidian develop a spiritual successor to the games they made back in the late 90s. They're making thousands of dollars an hour—the sort of success that nobody at the company had anticipated.

"I'm going around the offices, people are like holy shit," Urquhart told me. "It was so crazy. I'd go in to have a conversation, and while I'm talking to somebody, every five minute conversation I had we'd earn $5,000."

At around 5pm, he realized that nobody was going to get much work done, so they all went out for drinks across the street. As they sat and checked their phones, they watched the Kickstarter continue to rake in money: something like $25,000 every half hour.

By the end of the day, they'd earned $700,000.

"The next morning I went to breakfast with my daughter," Urquhart said. "She's nine. She wanted to know, cause my wife was all excited, she was like, ‘What's going on, Mommy?" She said, ‘Oh, Daddy did this thing,' and she plays the video. And my daughter's like, ‘Can we give him money?'"

They hit a million while Urquhart was at breakfast. They met their goal of $1.2 million on day two. And after 30 days—days full of updates, interviews, and late nights spent in Kickstarter comments sections—Obsidian earned close to $4 million.

It almost feels like a fairy tale ending: after years of rushed projects, sudden cancellations, and brutal layoffs, Obsidian is suddenly in control of its own destiny. They've got two promising games on the way, and even just a few months ago, major publishers were knocking on their door: Urquhart told me he's been talking to Bethesda, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., and LucasArts.

But not everybody is a fan of Obsidian Entertainment. Some RPG fans disliked their treatment of series like Neverwinter Nights and Fallout, and some have grown disillusioned with the company after what they see as a trend of rushed, buggy software. In many ways Project: Eternity's success is now an albatross. Between the South Park RPG and the Kickstartered phenomenon, expectations are at an all-time high for the group of developers from California.

Urquhart isn't worried about the pressure. He's optimistic about the next couple of years. "I really feel that 2013 and 2014 are gonna be great years for Obsidian," he said. "For gaming in general."

He's even got a dream project: Knights of the Old Republic III. On next-gen consoles.

"I think doing something like that on [Orbis and Durango] and things like that might be—I would be disappointed as a gamer if that never got made," Urquhart said. "I think a lot of gamers would be disappointed as well."

But Obsidian has a lot of dream projects, and the 90-person studio can't get to all of them. For now, they've got a lot of work to do. South Park has to meet expectations; Project: Eternity has to meet even higher expectations; and the company has to convince the world that they can release bug-free, polished video games.

So the story of Obsidian Entertainment isn't over yet. Maybe it's just begun.

Election Total War [Imgur via Reddit]

If Brian Fargo's Kickstarter-funded project reaches $2.1 million, it will be co-developed by Chris Avellone and the team behind games like Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol. [Rock Paper Shotgun]

We've already recognized a whole bunch of the best game soundtracks of 2011. But of course, there are only so many hours in the day—only so much time to play games, and one can only write about so many game soundtracks.

Fortunately, you guys were up to the task of nominating outstanding soundtracks that didn't make our official round-up. On Thursday, you put forth a ton of worthy original soundtracks from the year. I gathered 'em all together and listed them here.

As an unscientific aside, if I had to gauge the general tenor, enthusiasm, and number of nominations, Kotaku's "Readers' Choice" Award for Best 2011 Video Game Soundtrack would go to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, with Bastion and Xenoblade Chronicles as runners-up. Y'all have good taste.

Each of these entries has been written by a Kotaku commenter, sometimes more than one.

Let's get down to it, shall we?

Xenoblade Chronicles

There are two games that make my short list: Xenoblade Chronicles and Radiant Historia. If we are only counting US releases, then I will default to Radiant Historia. I place the Xenoblade OST above Radiant Historia's though. It is not because of the established talent behind it, but rather because of the surprising great work of ACE+. Each piece really brings you into your new environments, and the new battle theme that kicks in some time into the game is just fantastic. This is one song and environment I particularly enjoyed (and it is different from the other tracks usually posted by others and myself). —Dodgewd

At least for being released this year in the UK, Xenoblade deserves a call out for contributions from heavyweights like Yasunori Mitsuda and Yoko Shimomura.—Tye The Czar

True dat. Some great tracks throughout. This track plays in the first open area you get to explore. It conveys a great sense of freedom, one of the best aspects of Xenoblade from both a gameplay and a JRPG context. The first time I accidentally jumped off a bridge and plummeted hundreds of feet down into the water below, only to find that I could swim around and explore was something special. Even after spending hour 7 in Colony working on sidequest #4563, this track is fresh.—bobtheblob916

"Xenoblade Chronicles". I have played many videogames, among them many JRPGs and as a music hobbyist, if there something that I really appreciate is a soundtrack that helps you immerse in it's game world. "Xenoblade Chronicles" boasts a 4 audio CD soundtrack that manages to mimic the exact feelings of the what's happening on the screen. Beautiful, stunning compositions and I hope this wins next year when the game hits America and you will all see why I am nominating it right here.—Shiryu

To The Moon

There's a place deep inside me that rarely gets touched, moved. Too much of life is filled with the ordinary and mundane, we are surrounded by it, we choke on it. The moment I heard those first few simple notes I was swept to that place. The music has the ability to make the world stop for that brief moment when you listen to it. The soundtrack is all inclusive, all immersive and utterly captivating. It demands all of your attention, it gently compels you to feel, to share at that moment in the game the feelings that the characters go through... it is truly magical.—Han Cillers

Shadows of the Damned

There was a lot of great game music this year, I agree with most if not all of the previous posts. Though there's one game in particular that I feel bears mentioning: Shadows of the Damned. It has a really fantastic sound design, and I think this track is a descent, if not perfect, representation of the kind of atmospheric music you can find in it. That's not to say this is a great representation of the style of music you'll find in the game, though. That would be quite a feat, for the soundtrack shifts wildly from heavy metal, to old fashioned ragtime, to mariachi rock expertly from scene to scene. It would be impossible for me to disregard it as a heavy contender for my game music of the year.—VonAbsynt

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

I gotta say, Ghost Trick's music really gave the game's more intense moments the dramatic edge they needed. It's a bit like the music that plays when you make a successful objection in Phoenix Wright, it just gives you that "Oh man, shit just got real" feeling. My personal game of the year, for sure!—Diamond Sea

Batman: Arkham City

Bastion, Deus Ex: HR and The Witcher 2 are all highlights but I was most surprised by Batman: Arkham City. Perhaps because I could barely recall anything from Asylum, or because I was playing Arkham City so damn much. The theme is wonderful, and I love the build-up from about 1:17, that increase in tension that releases into a bold heroic yet tragic theme at around 1:56. 'This Court Is Now In Session' is also great music by which to punch people. In the game.—hot_heart

Sonic Generations

I am surprised not a single person has mentioned Sonic Generations and its incredible soundtrack! While I certainly wouldn't nominate it for any game of the year awards, its soundtrack is probably the best of any Sonic game. Rather than go straight-up rock, the composers instead went with a very violin-heavy sound that actually fits Sonic perfectly. Granted, almost every single song is a remix of a previous game, but it's impossible to deny that this is an incredible piece. The piano backing the violin is beautiful, and the drums really give the entire thing a sense of speed that just makes you want to move.—Goopygoo

Child of Eden

How could everyone forget Child of Eden's OST? The entire game is based on music, beats, and rhythm. This style of Tech-House is easy to listen to. Very catchy and with a soulful singer behind it too. Genki Rockets FTW!—tehjonel

Catherine

The soundtrack to Catherine is an incredibly strange mix of classical music and, I guess, rock? Either way, it's tremendously unique and the perfect music for a frenetic puzzle game.—PsychoDantis

Battlefield 3

I can't BELIEVE that no one has posted anything about Battlefield 3 yet!

The strange, electronic soundtrack goes perfectly with the atmosphere of the game, both in the singleplayer and multiplayer. For instance, when a multiplayer battle is reaching its conclusion, a track starts playing in the background, and the fight seems more and more intense until you see "Your team lost." or "Your team won!"

For me the music is a tribute to the intensity of battle that the game is trying to convey. That syncopated 6-feel rhythm sounds spastic yet oddly ordered, sort of like a series of autocannon shots or mortar shells going off. That little synth line that comes in on top is just so wonderfully placed, and carries the song, which starts out rhythmically, harmonically. All the little beeps and sounds are very similar to a lot of the noises that you hear in the game, like the target lock sound on your Javelin or a bullet whizzing by, or bits of dirt hitting the ground after an explosion.

Something about this music just really gets me into the game... makes me want to sprint around and vault over things before snapping my sight onto that Russian that's about to cap a flag.—llama.fragments

Radiant Historia

Yoko Shimomura just nailed it with Radiant Historia's OST, in my humble opinion. It's a game that goes without complex graphics and voiced dialogue, but it doesn't really need either because every track does such a wonderful job of setting the mood of a scene, conveying a particular emotion. This is the stuff classics are made of, both the game itself and the soundtrack.—Paradox Me

Someone already mentioned it but my vote goes to Radiant Historia too. Even though the soundtrack hasn't that many tracks it's still fantastic. Then again I shouldn't be surprised since the soundtrack was composed by Yoko Shimomura. And the game is amazing as well so if you haven't played it yet, go play it.—klezdoom

Dark Souls

Dark Souls for certain. Some of those boss themes are outright intense, but I fell in love with the game as soon as I heard the menu music. It's just so calm yet haunting as well, as if it were trying to comfort you before your hardship comes about each time. It almost reminds me of the Resident Evil save room themes.—GanymedeJupiter

Rarely does a game's negative use of music affect how powerful the musical parts actually are.—snakelinksonic

Tactics Ogre

Blasphemous Experiment (Nybbeth's theme) is probably the best example I can think of [of why this soundtrack needs more attention]. That song is just plain chilling, especially considering it's a battle theme. The original SNES version is okay, but the PSP arrangement is just ridiculously good. Such a good damn song. Whenever you hear it, it's also a good sign that you're probably about to get your ass kicked!—Archaotic

And there you have 'em, our readers' picks for the best soundtracks of 2011. Thanks to all who contributed!

Now, we should be the last people on Earth to get on a high horse over typos and associated spelling errors. But the fact this screenshot comes from the Japanese version of Virtua Tennis 4 on the Vita makes it too good to pass up.

@ItCameFromJapan [Twitter, via Destructoid]

The "Casino Night Pinball" minigame that console gamers got for preordering the game will be available to PC gamers via Steam on Dec. 26. It'll only run you $1.59 in the U.S. (Overseas, it's £0.99, €1.59, $2.99 in Australia).

In the minigame, you play as either classic Sonic or modern Sonic, and he's the pinball. Modern Sonic has a limited number of boosts, but otherwise the two are identical. Sega released these three screenshots with the announcement.

Still no word on when or if this will be made available over Xbox Live or PlayStation Network.

Masato Nakamura says he composed the remix of Sonic the Hedgehog's Green Hill Zone theme the way he did the original: By imagining it as a film. The difference is he only had still photographs when he wrote the song 20 years ago. Now for source material has the advantage of full motion video—and, of course, one of video gaming's most iconic pieces of music.

Wrapping up a series of vignettes on Sonic's 20th birthday, Sega takes a look at the substantial musical history of its flagship series. I'm not sure I gave the soundtrack in Sonic Generations enough credit; the remixes were very well done, although some of the tunes with vocals (notably City Escape's) had a sugar-pop way of boring into your skull.

But in any ranking of contributors to the much loved genre of video game music, Sonic and its artists would have to get a prominent mention. This video gives them a chance to take a bow, so give it a watch.

One thing we need to own up to with all these video game icons coming up on 15, 20 and 25 year anniversaries is that we're getting older, too. Just yesterday, Crecente was talking about all the trouble he has peeing lately. Poor guy.

With that aging comes memory loss, so you might need a refresher on how Sega's spiky blue mascot came to be. Or, maybe the young'uns amongst you need to learn it for the first time ever. This video in support of Sonic Generations rounds up the folks who where the creators and decision makers behind Sonic's debut and explains how the speedy icon came into the world. Blast processing!

Desperately attempting to please two different sets of fans on Sonic the Hedgehog's 20th anniversary, Sega has crammed two different types of hedgehog gameplay into Sonic Generations, a formula that never fails to create entertaining game reviews.

What else can Sega do? Some fans hate 2D Sonic, other fans hate 3D Sonic. They've tried making different games for different fans, but one group or the other always feels alienated, or something isn't quite right, or the stars are knocked out of alignment. They just can't win, so they've just crammed the whole history of the series into one title with two very different types of gameplay and called it a day. Here's your damn Sonic game, thanks for playing.

So tell me, assembled video game reviewers, how does that make you feel?

That feeling you get from playing every Sonic game after Genesis brews as disappointment and eventually becomes sympathy, mostly for the branded custodians at Sonic Team. They can't seem to please anybody, can they? Oh, Sonic's jumping feels wrong. The momentum is messed up over here. It's about exploration, not speed! Guys, the physics of my anthropomorphic blue hedgehog is inaccurate within this segmented fantasy landscape! Even when they make a game — well, let's say half a game — dedicated to capturing Sonic as he was, before vocal chords and a third dimension, they still can't win. Why?

Game Informer
The quest begins with side-scrolling tributes to memorable Genesis-era stages as classic Sonic. These levels rekindled the magic of being a wide-eyed kid seeing Sonic's world for the first time. Platforming is slightly tighter than in Sonic 4, which makes landing precise jumps easier. Tearing through loop de loops in Green Hill and bouncing across clouds in Sky Sanctuary are among my favorite Sonic moments, and they translate perfectly. Unfortunately, the good times fade when Sonic begins cruising through 2D versions of levels from post-Dreamcast Sonic games. Traversing the burning ruins of Crisis City from the awful 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog reboot is an exercise in frustration packed with unfair drop-offs and annoying gales.

Official Xbox Magazine (OXM)
The 2D levels feel as close to the original Genesis games as ever, and their use of old-school moves and physics was a smart call. But even the 3D takes on Sonic's oeuvre do the franchise justice, as they avoid most camera-based frustrations of early 3D editions. The two takes on nine different stages actually benefit from being based on the same template: seeing a 2D version of a modern enemy or hearing an updated version of Green Hill Zone's iconic theme makes you want to try both stage types.

Computer and Video Games (CVG)
After each of the worlds has been restored by playing both acts, five challenge maps open for each world, each playable as - and completely different as - either Sonic. New Sonic has friends along to help, Amy helping him jump with her hammer, Knuckles digging for treasure, and (shudder) Cream providing a limited number of rings in otherwise ringless levels.

These are 90% optional - you only have to play one of each of the world's ten challenges to grab the boss keys and move on, but they're also where you'll go to get your money's worth, when your relatively short minimum obligations end.

Games Radar
But when you put the past to one side and look at the new game in isolation, there are essentially two games on show here - and I don't mean the classic/modern divide. The first is the one that stumbles on the things that Mario does so well. The attractive yet haphazard experience ridden with missed platforms, unexpected deaths and awkward low-speed movement in 3D space.

Then there's the other game. The one that's cruising by on the grind rail above it all, pulling tricks through bonus hoops with stars in its wake, locking onto secret ziplines and waiting for the split second where Sonic completes an aerial somersault to face the next platform before boosting away for another S grade. The one that's everything fans have wanted for so long. You can guess which one I've been playing.

IGN
It feels refreshing to be able to say that Sonic is good again. His upward trajectory over the last year continues and he's only gaining momentum. Sonic Generations is largely a game for the most hardcore of Sonic fans, but for the millions who have fond memories of narrowly dodging spikes, grinding on rails, or even that time he was a pinball, Sonic Generations is a game made for you.

Earlier today I was wondering what qualified me to review Sonic Generations, beyond my capacity for saying "god dammit." Yet after a solid 24 hours with this game not only are my eyeballs properly tracking its sidescrolling motion, I've recovered my innate understanding of the technical requirements of a solid speed-run through a Sonic world.

Sega is looking to reward that with a speed-run contest through the 3D version of Green Hill Zone in Sonic Generations, and you don't even need a full copy of the game to participate. Just go get the game's demo, and then practice, practice, practice (and say goddammit, goddammit, goddammit) until you get that time below 1:50. The video above (which is fun to watch even if you don't have the game) breaks down the optimal path with protips to help you get it perfect, but it still looks like it will take a lot of patience, practice and retries.

Capture your performance, upload it to YouTube, and you'll be eligible for some Sonic-themed prizes from Sega, but the bragging rights are the real reward. See the link for details and rules. The contest is open from today until Nov. 9.

Speed Your Way Through Green Hill for a Chance to Win! [Sega Blog]