InXile Entertainment has announced that any $20+ Kickstarter backers of The Bard’s Tale 4, which is currently hammering its way towards a $1.25 million campaign goal, will receive the original Bard’s Tale Trilogy for free.
These new, emulated versions of the classic dungeon-crawlers will be adapted for modern systems by Rebecca Heineman, the programmer for The Bard’s Tale 3. That means they’ll run natively without the need for third-party software.
”Even before we launched the Kickstarter, we were constantly asked “can you do a re-release of the original The Bard’s Tale trilogy” and we heard you,” the team writes in a recent Kickstarter update. ”We have been hard at work behind the scenes looking at ways to make it happen! The first step was getting Electronic Arts to sign on as they own the publishing rights to the old games, having originally brought them to the market in the mid-80s. EA very graciously had no objections at all, a big thanks to them for their help in making this giveaway happen.”
As InXile isn’t dealing with the new versions itself, the team can’t put an exact date on when backers will be able to get their hands on them. The developer does point out that players shouldn’t feel obliged to complete the original trilogy in order to understand what’s going on in The Bard’s Tale 4 - as studio founder Brian Fargo revealed to me in our recent interview, the team’s writing a new, standalone story set a hundred years after the last game ended, though there will be many references to past events.
Meanwhile, the game’s Kickstarter campaign seems to be going swimmingly. At the time of this post the project’s gathered $1,160,895 in pledges, from a $1,250,000 goal.