by Neal Stephenson is a geek legend at this point. I don’t think his first novel Snow Crash would have existed without William Gibson’s early novels coming first, but it’s just speculation on my part unless I get a chance to talk to either author. Don’t get me wrong, I love Neal’s books and unlike some, I’ve liked each new one better then the last. What some see as a weakness — stuffing a tremendous amount of knowledge on the subjects of his books — well, I tend to love that part of his books.
His most recent project, The Mongoliad, came out of his interest in sword fighting which is also something he’s learned to do in real life. Now he’s started Clang, an ambitious Kickstarter project, to do a videogame that more faithfully implements sword fighting mechanics on the screen.
[kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang width=550]
It’s a very funny video and in fact there’s a second also funny video further down the Kickstarter page. $500,000 is a lot of cash but not all that much in terms of the millions spent on game development these days. It looks like headed into today, it’s about 1/5 of the way to its goal.
