It’s been a busy week with smashing through 100%! We are now sailing along - nearly half way towards our first stretch goal, we had a big news piece released, and we've announced a couple fun new characters!
36 HOURS (just under!)
WOW. It’s absolutely awesome to be nearly 110% funded at this point! We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again - we are SO GRATEFUL to each and every one of you backers! THANK YOU!
A lot can happen in 36 hours - so let’s see what we can do! Will we reach that first STRETCH GOAL?! We hope so! The in-game social media app would really add to the gameplay experience.
New Characters
If you have kept an eye on our twitter feed, then you will be aware of these fun additions. We had a great livestreamed interview with Biella Coleman, an anthropologist who studies hacker cultures on Monday. Yesterday, we announced security researcher Hacker Fantastic.
Biella Coleman
Gabriella (Biella) Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarship covers the cultures and ethics of hacking. She is currently working on Hack_Curio: a curated ensemble of hacker-related videos that will be accompanied by short reflections on the featured clip written by researchers, writers, and journalists working on these topics. The site will launch in the late fall of 2018.
She has authored two books, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014). Her work has been featured in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes. Committed to public ethnography, she routinely presents her work to diverse audiences, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, and has written for popular media outlets. She sits on the board of The Tor Project.
She is a fairly significant chronicler of hacker culture and perfect addition as a character to the OFF GRID universe.
Hacker Fantastic
Hacker Fantastic is a professional hacker with over 15 years experience providing security services to a global client base. He is widely known for his research on vulnerabilities in North Korea, exploiting the late Prime Minister of Singapore's code and his hacking of Microsoft's “ransomware-proof" computer during 2017.
HF’s research on exploits powering the WannaCry ransomware, NSA leaks, and Shadow Brokers in 2017 were published to an audience of over 500 million. He is an expert in his field and is highly sought after, to lead long-term engagements that accurately reflect real-world security challenges, simulating attacks on global and high-risk environments.
Fantastic’s work is known globally and he has been at the forefront of discovery and dissection of state level hacking tools. His background in the professional research side of hacker culture creates interesting balance within the world of OFF GRID.
Count down with us!
If you're in/near London, join us for a little celebration as we count down to the campaign's end tomorrow night! There will be a livestream countdown, too - sign up for a reminder and watch it via the OFF GRID Kickstarter page!
Please keep sharing the campaign - it’s not long to go now!
THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
P.S. Have you wishlisted OFF GRID? Joined the mailing list?!