This will be a tale I will tell for the rest of my life. Sacred Fire has successfully raised $65,000 and reached all 3 stretch goals. Check out are Kickstarter page, if you haven’t had a chance to see it during the campaign. Here’s the story of the last moments of the campaign.

After sending out the last update calling on our backers to make one last push to reach the #2 stretch goal, to our delight, with just 4 hours left on the clock, we did.

I didn’t really have time to think about it, so it was more an instinct to fight till the last breath than a strategic move, we send out the message on the forums and social media: “Can someone #UnleashTheBeast? Let’s find the voice for our story characters.”

And the pledges kept coming in, but we were not going to make it. We were still a couple of thousands shy of the third stretch goal in the last few minutes. I remember thinking to myself: “Great, this was a good fight. I can die a happy man now.” And just sat back and watched the timer count down.

Little did I know things were far from over.

With single digit seconds on the timer a few backers rounded up the total raised to $65,000 unlocking the last stretch goal.

It took me completely by surprise. It never crossed my mind, that someone would do that. And then the congratulation comments started to come in and I knew it was for real.

At the very beginning of the campaign we told you guys “This story is yours to tell”. And what a story you told! Thank you for giving us an ending to remember.

Game Changers

The more I think back about the campaign the more I see it could have gone both ways. I would like to take the time to thank all the people who are now forever part of our success story and helped to shape the fate of our campaign.

We would like to thank our friends who despite their busy schedules found the time to understand and support Sacred Fire: Brian Fargo, Swen Vincke, Rhianna Pratchett, Doug Cockle, Chris Avellone, Simon Sicko, Matus Kirchmayer and TQ Jefferson.

We would like to thank our friends at Dead Good Media and the journalists who follow their passion and gave a chance to our debut game: Joanna Mueller at Cliqist, Nathan Grayson at Kotaku, The Playstation Blog, Minoru Umise at Automaton Japan, Václav Pecháček at Games.Tiscali.cz, Joe Donnelly at PC Gamer, Daniel Vacek at IGN, and many more.

We are grateful to creators of Mordhau, Divinity: Original Sin II, Battle Princess Madelyn, Pine, Banner Saga, Antegods, All Walls Must Fall, The Mandate and others for introducing Sacred Fire to their backers.

We would like to thank our active community and the many backers who spread the word on social media, forums and reddit. Thank you also for your great feedback and many questions. It all helps us make the game better.

Last but not least we would like to thank our families, friends and wives for supporting us, and putting up with our borderline schedules and states of mind for the last month. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Campaign Stats

Here is a quick look at our campaign through some numbers:

• the average pledge for Sacred Fire comes in quite high at $45
• there were 2,403 people who watched the 3:39 pitch video till the very end!
• the favorite reward tiers was the $18/$20 Sparkbearer tier with 683 backers
• strongest day was the glorious final day when you pledged almost $9,000
• there will be 12 people on the Roman Mosaic, and 24 in-game names
• Doug Cockle will record 24 voicemail messages and sign 82 boxes

Also we would like to know what happened in the magnificent town of Madison, Wisconsin? For its size it has a lot of backers and made it onto our top 10 cities.

We would like to thank Anya Combs at Kickstarter Games and the whole Kickstarter team for building this wonderful platform for creators. Kickstarter brought in a third of our backers, with 88% repeat backers. Thank you also for getting the Project We Love badge on Day 1 and the Games Category Feature. We couldn’t have done it on our own.

What’s next

A week from now we will be at Reboot Develop, one of the biggest game dev conferences in Europe happening in the real world’s King’s Landing, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Besides spreading the word about Sacred Fire we are meeting with our friends and potential allies to explore the opportunities to make the development ahead of us smoother.

The last 28 days have been an incredible experience that created a community around our game and will fuel our inner flame in the following months.

As this story is ours to tell.

And it’s just beginning.

Thank you.