Blue Dot Games is reviving ’83, a multiplayer shooter game set in the midst of the Cold War, after a previous publisher canceled the game.
Now the studio said it has raised partial funding for its ’83 title, thanks to money from an angel investor on the company’s Discord channel. The money came in after 18 months of pitching industry funding sources.
Aiming for accessible realism, the studio said the PC title has signed a deal with an angel investor for funding for five months of development, and it has started a Kickstarter campaign to help generate more of the funding so it can ship the game in about a year.
The studio has 14 people, and it said it’s proud and humbled, considering that the “gaming industry’s business development crowd is hesitant to invest into new projects in the current harsh climate.”
The funding came primarily through direct messages on the company’s Discord server. Here’s what investor (and Rising Storm 2 fan) Kevin Green said about his investment, ““One day, Tony Gillham (Blue Dot Games’ CEO) put out a call on the ’83 Discord saying they needed testers to do a video for a potential investment group.”
He added, “My background is in finance for the better part of a decade, and I’ve done quite well investing in the semiconductor business, which allowed me to start getting into other forms of investing — like private equity. So I figured – I’m a qualified investor, gaming is a sector I’m interested in, and ‘83 is the kind of game I would like to play, let’s see what they have to offer.”
He said he liked what the leaders of Blue Dot Games had going and the game is far along in development.
‘83 is a FPS originally developed at Antimatter Games, a studio closed in 2023 by Enad Global 7, with their projects (IGI Origins and ‘83) shelved.
As the game garnered a very dedicated fanbase, Blue Dot Games decided to pick up the rights to ‘83 in late 2023 and give the game another chance to live.
The main premise of ‘83 is its focus on “accessible realism,” a large-scale multiplayer team-based shooter gameplay set in the cold-war-gone-hot backdrop of the early 1980s.
“The game aims to deliver action-packed, authentic multiplayer matches of infantry and vehicles that last about 30-40 minutes each. That length is key: games in the milsim-esque genre usually require a significant time investment from their players. We’re compressing the gameplay experience to the fun bits only, skipping the ‘walking sim’ part of the gameplay,” said Tony Gillham, CEO of Blue Dot Games, in a statement.
Gillham is one of the original developers of the Red Orchestra and Rising Storm mods and games.
Through negotiations and diligent planning, the studio was able to utilize Kevin Green’s undisclosed investment to build a team of 10 senior developers, now working to deliver a vertical slice of ‘83 on Unreal Engine 5 within the next five months.
This vertical slice is meant to represent the core gameplay of ‘83 in a build that’s well playable and showcases all the strengths of the game’s concept, leading to the ultimate goal: to secure additional funding and bring the game to a Steam Early Access launch, ideally in 2025.
“I think something that’s a feature of this project is that we aren’t doing things the normal way. ‘83 is a game that’s died twice and is back. This is a new studio. We’re not going to follow the established norms. Why should we, who should anymore? We now have a very good team,” said Chris Rickard, COO of Blue Dot Games, in a statement. “There are many reasons to want to be part of this project: our combined experience, the product, the passionate community. And we’re hopeful that by developing this vertical slice, we will finally be able to break through the last barriers of our industry and get ‘83 fully funded.”
Rickard is a successful business owner in the IT industry and a previous IT manager at Antimatter Games.
