77-year-old auteur and winery owner Francis Ford Coppola keeps himself quite busy, what with a couple of restaurants and wineries up in the North Bay including this Native American-themed one that just opened in Sonoma County. But now he's trying to get a video game off the ground based on his canonized 1979 war film Apocalypse Now, as the Associated Press reports, Coppola is seeking $900,000 in crowdfunding from Kickstarter because "video game publishers wouldn’t provide him the artistic freedom he’s seeking."
This is reminiscent of Coppola's own singular vision for the film itself, which took over 15 months to shoot due to multiple catastrophes, including a heart attack for leading man Martin Sheen. As Coppola said at one point, "We had access to too much money and little by little we went insane."
The Apocalypse Now game will be “an immersive, psychedelic horror role-playing game," and in a personal message on the Kickstarter page, "Some video game developers told we should license our film and do a shooter game or a mobile version, solely trading on the name and title of the iconic film. But that's the last thing I'd want to do." He further explains, in the game he wants to see, "You are Captain Willard, but you don't have to make the same choices he made... It's about not getting killed rather than being a killer, until you reach Kurtz."
Backers of the project are guaranteed copies of the game as well as a host of other swag, and they're hoping to have the game complete by 2020.