Help Kill Screen Reinvent Their Magazine: The best game magazine ever is getting best-er, but we need your help.

Five years ago, we published the first issue of Kill Screen thanks to a successful Kickstarter. Independent games had begun to break into the mainstream, with Braid and then Limbo proving that small teams could make financially successful games that at once simplified and expanded the possibilities of gaming. We wanted to expose the innovation we saw making its way into the mainstream and treat games like any other art, colliding them with film and music and design. That is why you’ll see that our new magazine is changing visually, with a sleeker design, cleaner image, and a more personable, grown up feel.

So on just six thousand dollars that we raised on Kickstarter, we produced 9 issues of our magazine, helped launch the careers of many fantastic game writers, published a daily website that has consistently pushed the boundaries of game criticism, and put on three conferences that have thrown the relationship between games and culture into stark relief.

We are now back on Kickstarter to reinvent our current magazine: to be much bigger, bolder, and better looking than ever before.

Kill Screen is back on Kickstarter because we owe so much to the success of our first project. Without our initial successful Kickstarter and this amazing community, we would not have been able to publish our magazine or build our company into what it is today. We remain an independent publication, and we want to stay that way. So it’s up to this Kickstarter and our lovely supporters to make this revamp a reality–– if the project isn’t funded, we won’t be able to make this happen.

There are a lot of exciting new changes to our magazine. Firstly, it’s going to be physically larger and will contain full-color portraits of the creators we’re featuring. We are working once again with Shapco for our printing needs. They are a family-owned company in Minnesota that has been in business for almost forty years.

We’re going to showcase the independent creators that are important to us through reported features, visual essays, and rigorously researched, long-form criticism. We’ll dig deep into the most important new games by sending writers and photographers to find out how they came to be: not through Skype interviews but through a week of embedded reporting.

We’ll continue to seek out the most thoughtful, curious writers in videogames and give them space to thoroughly grapple with games past and present. 

Our magazine will feature writers from top publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, GQ, the LA Times, and many, many more.

An issue of Kill Screen will be an essential collection of videogame writing, with a laser focus on what’s important and new alongside Saturday-afternoon longreads. People familiar with the site will see their favorite writers off the leash, exploring the things they love with unprecedented resources.

Those who don’t have time for videogame writing in their day-to-day will have a sumptuously designed, one-stop-shop to know what matters. We believe games are for everyone. We want to show you why.

For an idea of who we’ll be covering, here’s who has already committed to be featured in this project, among others:

–Ben Esposito, Donut County

–Teddy Diefenbach, Hyper Light Drifter

–Nina Freeman, Cibele

–David OReilly, Mountain

–Jenny Jiao Hsia, Beglitched

–Winnie Song, Badblood

–Jane Ng, Firewatch

–Marc Ten Bosch, Miegakure

–Fullbright, Tacoma

–Erica Gorochow, Specimen

–Brendon Chung, Quadrilateral Cowboy

The change we saw coming in 2010 has taken root. Videogames have grown up! The promise of “indie games” now thrives in little online spaces and onstage at E3; game jams pop up, and blast out dozens of games worth playing and talking about. Perhaps most importantly, this is the first time in history when gaming’s old monoculture has started breaking down. Now you can have taste in games, the same way you might in film or music. You don’t have to like Call of Duty on one end of the spectrum or Gone Home, on the other; there are a million shades of gray—and blue, and purple, and taupe, and so on—to choose from. All of which creates a new challenge for Kill Screen: to inspire a life well-played. Our magazine launched as “smart” videogame writing, but in 2015 it needs to be more than smart: it needs to be deeper, better reported, and curatorial to cover an exploding culture.

Top, left to right:

Rachel Catlett – Project Associate

Jamin Warren – Founder and CEO

Judy Romano – Business Development Associate

Middle, left to right:

David McDowell – Photographer

Justin Kielbasa – Designer

Bottom, left to right:

Jane Mai – Business Assistant

Zach Budgor – Editor 

Clayton Purdom – Editorial Director

Pledge $5 or More: You will receive a digital issue of our new magazine and your name forever on a weird digital monument to our backers, designed by Camp Cult’s Cale Bradbury. 

Pledge $25 or More: You will receive a physical copy of our new magazine, plus a digital copy of Boss Fight Books’ Super Mario Bros. 2 by Kill Screen’s own Jon Irwin. (Includes previous reward)

Pledge $50 or More: You will be a member of the exclusive Kill Screen Games Club. This incredible tier includes download codes for over 20 games, including former Kill Screen game of the year Gone Home as well as favorites like Sylvio, Heavy Bullets, The Floor is Jelly, Elegy for a Dead World, Beeswing, FEIST, Catlateral Damage, and many more. You can choose between weird games or arcade games, but we promise, they’re all great. You’ll have permanent admission to a dedicated online space to chat with other club members and Kill Screen writers, get sneak peeks into upcoming print content, and to take part in online chats about these games.

This tier is limited to 75 backers for each club, and excluded from higher rewards tiers. (Includes all previous rewards)

Pledge $80 or More: You will receive an annual subscription to our magazine, including four physical issues. You will also get a one-year subscription to a club of original digital wallpapers straight to your inbox from our favorite artists. (Includes all previous rewards)

Pledge $130 or More: You will receive one full-access ticket to our annual Two5six festival, praised as “the TED of videogames” by Mashable. This day-long celebration of games and culture has previously featured speakers such as MOMA’s Paola Antonelli, Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey, legendary game designer Tim Schafer, and many more. You’ll also receive an original drawing of your beautiful self by our resident illustrator Jane Mai (check out our team illustration to see an example of her work). (Includes all previous rewards excluding $50 tier)

Pledge $500 or More: You will receive three years of admittance to our annual Two5six festival, praised as “the TED of videogames” by Mashable. (Includes all previous rewards excluding $50 tier)

Pledge $1000 or More: You will get to chat with our founder, Jamin Warren, and two of the devs we feature via Skype or Google Hangouts for 30 minutes. Also includes an lifetime subscription to our magazine. (Includes all previous rewards excluding $50 tier) 

Pledge $2000 or More: You will be our inside cover sponsor for one of our issues. (Limit 4, includes all previous rewards excluding $50 tier)

The main cost for producing each issue is production––printing the magazine larger and with higher-quality paper. We’re boosting our schedule to a rigidly-kept quarterly event, we’re including beautiful color photography rather than solely illustrations, and we’re going to be sending out writers for international embedded reporting. And of course, we want to be able to pay the writers and artists that work with us what they deserve rather than trying to make do on a shoestring budget.

Our funding goal is much higher this time around than it was during our first campaign. Kickstarter was a very different place in 2009, and you couldn’t ask for large funding goals to support the quality of publication you wanted as easily as you can now. We wanted to make a quarterly publication, but it proved impossible to do so on just $6,000. So this time we’re asking for upgraded funding to support an upgraded publication.

We have an extremely thorough model to calculate costs to make this magazine, and we’ve spent a great amount of time carefully determining how much money we need to do the magazine right for a full year. We don’t want to undersell it and risk not being able to fulfill.

You will be a member of the exclusive Kill Screen Games Club. This incredible tier includes download codes for over 20 games, including former Kill Screen game of the year Gone Home as well as favorites like Sylvio, Heavy Bullets, The Floor is Jelly, Elegy for a Dead World, Beeswing, FEIST, Catlateral Damage, and many more. You can choose between weird games or arcade games, but we promise, they’re all great. You’ll have permanent admission to a dedicated online space to chat with other club members and Kill Screen writers, get sneak peeks into upcoming print content, and to take part in online chats about these games.

This tier is limited to 75 backers for each club, and excluded from higher rewards tiers. (Includes all previous rewards)

Source: ICNW