Apocalypse Now – The Game

The iconic film director Francis Ford Coppola is developing a video game version of his epic Vietnam war film “Apocalypse Now”.  Thirty eight years since the film burst onto cinema screens, Coppola says he wants to revisit the classic in video game form.  The game will be an RPG full of tension and tactical decision making with outcomes determined by both player and character skill.  From a first person perspective, the player will take on the role of US Army Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen in the 1979 movie. You will be able to explore the rivers of Vietnam, pass through jungle and travel up river to find and assassinate the elusive rogue, Colonel Kurtz – accused of having a private army and behaving “totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct” – without killing everyone and staying alive and undiscovered.

The Oscar-winning Director and renowned auteur is asking the public to help fund the making of the game by launching a Kickstarter page with a target of $900,000, after the game companies that were approached about the project refused to fund it.  “I learned quickly that the major game publishers have modelled themselves after the big Hollywood studios, in that they’re driven to make risk-free, formulaic, tent-pole projects that fit easily into a specific genre,” he said. “So I wasn’t surprised to hear that these companies weren’t ready to take on Apocalypse Now in the way we wanted to make it.”

The game, which is due to launch in 2020, is being developed by a team of collaborators including Coppola’s own film studio, American Zoetrope and also some of the teams behind ‘Gears of War’, ’Battlefield’ and ‘Fallout: New Vegas’.

‘Apocalypse now’ is regarded as one of the most influential war films to date and in 2000 was selected to be preserved by the U.S, National Film Registry, despite it only picking up one Golden Globe for best Picture and just two Oscars for cinematography and sound.

It is expected that the $900,000 Kickstarter fund will only provide a portion of the astronomic costs that are needed for game development and marketing.  It’s a good way to test the reaction to the product at an early stage – and so far the reaction has been mostly positive.  The campaign has already sold out of it’s cheapest $25 investments, which will gives you a copy of the game.  The packages go up to $10,000 which will get you an array of goodies and an associate producer credit  on the game itself.  If the Kickstarter campaign is very successful, the team promises to extend it and if $2.5m is raised, the game will be ported from the PC to Playstation and Xbox and a further $3m budget would see it adapted for VR.  With enough funding, the game should be finished by 2020 and it’s looking positive after $55,000 was raised just one day after the announcement.   The original film was plagued by calamities such as Martin Sheen’s heart attack in the middle of filming, a hurricane and extensive re-editing which dragged the film over a year behind schedule.