James Pond Kickstarter canceled

The Kickstarter campaign for a new James Pond game was canceled today after gathering £16,000 of its £100,000 goal from a total of 336 backers.

"Today after much discussion and thought we made the difficult decision to end our campaign early," project manager and producer PJ Belcher said.

"Although we have 12 days to go it's clear that we aren't going to make our £100,000 goal, so instead of pretending otherwise and continuing the updates we've decided to be honest with ourselves and with you and stop."

When the campaign launched last month, creator Chris Sorrell said, "I have no idea if there are enough people that still care about James Pond after all these years."

Though the campaign "wasn't the success we'd hoped for," Belcher promised a "new, strong" campaign sometime in the future. More news on this new endeavor will be shared "soon," Belcher said.

One of the reasons the James Pond Kickstarter came up short was because developer Gameware Europe did not have enough of the game to show, Belcher said.

"This was a risk, and it didn't work out, but I will say a huge thank you to everyone who pledged," he said.

The original James Pond launched in 1990, and was successful enough to spawn two sequels, with James Pond 2 having been ported to many other platforms over the years.