Ecco the Dolphin a game in which a porpoise saved sea animals and talked to magic crystals, was a rare case of a 16-bit game that was a quiet, meditative experience. Creator Ed Annunziata and his team have turned to crowd-funding for the game's spiritual successor, titled "The Big Blue."
The Kickstarter project (via Polygon) is aiming for a $665,000 goal over the next 34 days. The team is already thinking about stretch goals too, in the form of making the game an MMO--but obviously it has to clear the hurdle of its initial goal first.
Much like Ecco, the game will focus on exploration and puzzle-solving, but you'll be playing as all kinds of sea creatures, or even swarms of creatures at a time. The game hopes to launch in April of 2014 on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android devices. If you just can't wait a full year, you could try out the prototype now.
The Big Blue boasts not only Annunziata and Laszlo Szenttornyai from the original Ecco games, but also Spencer Nilsen, who composed the original Ecco scores, and Bear McCreary, for composing the scores to The Walking Dead and Battlestar Galactica.
Annunziata had previously talked about the game conceptually, and at that time mentioned he wanted to try Kickstarter.