The blood donation ‘peripheral’ cooked up by group Brand & Grotesque has had their Kickstarter suspended by the crowd-funding website. So far they haven’t offered an official statement why.
It’s likely there were concerns over the safety of such an idea, which is that blood is drawn from donor gamers during special blood drive events as they were taking damage in multiplayer matches.
Blood Sport: The Ultimate in Immersive Gaming was the name of the campaign was has since been stomped on by Kickstarter higher-ups with no explanation, except to say they ‘don’t comment on suspended campaigns’. If successful the group said their blood-sucking peripheral wouldn’t be made available to the public but instead taken to special blood donor drives.
We reported earlier on Blood Sport when it first went live on Kickstarter.
The idea behind the technology for it was to ‘hack’ the rumble packs on controllers to work with an Arduino board that regulates when blood is to be drawn from the donor, which only triggers when they get hurt in the game. They said it used the same safety measures as real blood donor systems.
”Our goal is to develop a refined multi-player unit that can be taken across the country for blood donation gaming events. We are not a charity and we are not a game manufacturer. We are simply creating the gaming hardware that will allow us to get gamers thinking about more important issues while still doing what they love. From there, we’ll partner with the appropriate organizations in both the gaming and medical communities to bring it all to life.”
Before the suspension the project had raised just $3,390 CAD out of their proposed $250,000 CAD.
