Doom came to Atlantic City after all

See that boardgame in the image above? Savor it. That’s as close as most of us will ever get to playing The Doom That Came to Atlantic City despite a successful crowd-funding campaign that closed in June of 2012. It was described by the creator on the Kickstarter page as a sort of reverse Monopoly in which players took the role of a Lovecraftian Elder God and tried to destroy Atlantic City instead of building it up.

People were excited by the tongue-in-cheek concept and by the art which mixed whimsy with horror. Wired wrote about it as did Tom on Quarter to Three. By the time the Kickstarter closed, the funding effort raised about four times more than the creator was asking for.

Unfortunately, it appears the game will never be a reality. The project lead, Erik Chevalier has admitted that the creation of the game as well as the establishment of a new company has gotten beyond his control and that the whole thing is being terminated. In an update to backers, Chevalier wrote that the failure of the game rests on his inexperience managing a project of this size.

From the beginning the intention was to launch a new board game company with the Kickstarted funds, with The Doom that Came to Atlantic City as only our first of hopefully many projects. Everyone involved agreed on this. Since then rifts have formed and every error compounded the growing frustration, causing only more issues. After paying to form the company, for the miniature statues, moving back to Portland, getting software licenses and hiring artists to do things like rule book design and art conforming the money was approaching a point of no return. We had to print at that point or never. Unfortunately that wasn’t in the cards for a variety of reasons.

As for the crowd-funded money, Chevalier said that he will try to return the pledges when he can secure employment and begin paying into a fund he will set up. He explained that he will try to pay back the people that pre-ordered the game through their webstore before returning money to Kickstarter backers.