Los Angeles, October 24, 2012— Legendary game developer Chris Roberts and his newly formed company, Cloud Imperium, announced today that the company has raised more than $540,000 in pledges on Kickstarter for their new space combat game, Star Citizen, currently in development. The Kickstarter campaign, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen, launched on October 18 with a stated goal of raising $500,000 in pledges. The goal was reached overnight on October 23, in five and a half days. Currently on Kickstarter there are 12,000 backers of the project which signals the return to gaming for Roberts after a decade long hiatus as a Hollywood filmmaker. Roberts made his mark in the gaming industry with award-winning titles such as Wing CommanderPrivateer and Freelancer.

Roberts announced Star Citizen on October 10 at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) Online in Austin, Texas. At the same time he launched a self-operated crowd funding site atwww.robertsspaceindustries.com, which also doubles as the Star Citizen site. In two weeks, that site has raised more than $1.3 million (and more than 15,000 additional backers), bringing the total amount of pledges on both sites to more than $1.9 million dollars and within easy reach of the company’s stated minimum pledge goal of $2 million.

“The amount of support from our fans has been overwhelming,” Roberts said. “We had a few hiccups on our own site in the first week of operation, which led us to open up the Kickstarter page. Kickstarter provided better scalability for us and additional options for our fans. In the end, this is all about breathing new life into the PC games business. PC gamers have been left on the sidelines for the last few years. I want to utilize all the new technology that a PC can provide and bring space sims back into the modern area with a bang.

“Getting back into gaming is something I’ve been thinking about for several years. With all the new tech, it’s a whole different universe for developers and I’m ready to take the welcomed plunge again. All I can say is that I’m having a blast doing this. With all these backers and pledges and the team we’ve assembled, we can and will raise the bar to a different stratosphere for PC gamers and space sims.

“There’s still plenty of time to pledge if you haven’t done that already,” Roberts continued. “Both our site and the Kickstarter site continue to take pledges and will do that into the middle of next month.”

More information about Star Citizen, including videos and trailers of the game, regular communications from Roberts to fans, community forums, game fiction and art can be found atwww.robertsspaceindustries.com.

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Jerry Paxton

A long-time fan and reveler of all things Geek, I am also the Editor-in-Chief and Founder of GamingShogun.com