Just a little more than two days remain in the Retronauts Kickstarter. We hit our $52,000 stretch goal overnight, meaning we’ll be traveling to three different gaming-related events for live presentations over the coming year. Personally, I’m hoping for New York Comic-Con and Classic Gaming Expo. I can also state, tentatively, that we’ll actually be presenting at five events (organizers willing, of course): Ray won’t be able to make it to PAX Prime or PAX East, but those shows are a longstanding tradition for Retronauts, so Bob and I will be putting in panel submissions and heading to Seattle and Boston, even if we have to fly on our own dime.

I haven’t dwelt much on the Kickstarter campaign here, because I am compulsively averse to self-promotion, and to requesting money from people. But please realize that this campaign represents the realization of a long-held dream of mine. Some of you old-timers may recall I started Retronauts as a series of blog posts here on this site back in… oh man, 2005? After a while, I started cross-posting them to 1UP. And when the podcast thing started to gain momentum at 1UP, I decided to try putting together a classic gaming show. Since I expected it would be a disaster and didn’t intend to do more than two or three episodes, I didn’t bother to come up with a punchy new name for it. I just called it Retronauts and figured it would be an amusing thing to occupy a couple of weeks of work. Obviously, I’m not very good at predicting the future.

When the ZD Game Group mags co-opted the Retronauts name as a banner for all the classic gaming columns I was producing for the magazines, I was happy to be complicit. I’d hoped that if the Retronauts name gained enough momentum, my bosses would let me make good on my crazy original scheme for the brand (such as it was): Turning it into a site to enshrine game history. I’d registered retronauts.com long before the podcast started specifically for that purpose. But despite several entreaties to the powers-that-were over the years, nothing ever came of it.

So, needless to say, I’m pretty excited about this. I don’t want to speak for my collaborators, but to me this is a chance to do something far more meaningful than simply run a podcast and a blog. We’ll talk more about that once things are further along, but we’re turning Retronauts into something more than just a podcast, and all I can say is… it’s about damn time.

In the meantime, please consider chipping in on the Retronauts Kickstarter, if you haven’t already. We have a year of podcasts and videos in the work, but every dollar that goes into the coffers helps us develop more and better things. Not just for us, and not just for you, but for games. Thanks for your support, and wish us luck in these final hours.