Jason Rohrer, genius video game designer of “Passage” fame, is Kickstarter-ing his latest creation, “Diamond Trust of London,” a Nintendo DS game about Angolan conflict diamond trade. Rohrer needs funds to produce officially-licensed physical cartridges of the game in accordance with Nintendo’s manufacturing specifications, the final step of the game’s three-year development life. If the project isn’t funded by May 26th, the game bites the dust.

View Link [kickstarter.com]

In 1981 a young Howard Scott Warshaw, left his first programming job at HP for a more interesting job at Atari. His first assignment was to create an Atari 2600 conversion of the vector coin op game Star Castle. After evaluating the arcade game and the console hardware he came to the conclusion “that a decent version couldn’t be done” (http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/378/on_game_design_the_.php?page=2), and “that this conversion would suck on the VCS system” (http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_howard_scott_warshaw.html). So he reorganized the core game-play elements into a new game designed specifically for the 2600. That game became Yars’ Revenge, the most successful original Atari game ever for the Atari 2600. I used to work at Atari on the 2600 and I thought “surely it can be done”, and after a lot of hard work, some humbling failures, 30 years later – I DID IT! I created an 8K Star Castle cartridge that works in the 2600, a version that could have shipped in 1981, AND I went on to create my own circuitry, logic chip and designed and machined a clear lexan case (on a CNC machine that I designed and built myself but that’s another story) made labels and a box ~ basically the whole package. I’ve been making video games for 25 years, have worked on nearly every game console ever made and this is quite possibly the coolest thing I have ever done.

View Link [kickstarter.com]