Wayside Creations Raises $121,649 For Fully Licensed Fan Series

Wayside Creations is best known for their fan-filmed series Fallout: Nuka Break, but Finnish video game developer Almost Human hopes they’ll become even more well-known for their upcoming fan-filmed series, Legend of Grimrock.

The several-episode program that will eventually be combined into a feature-length film is based on Almost Human’s video game of the same name. The developer is marketing the video game version as “the ultimate dungeon crawling RPG” and it’s using the forthcoming series created by Wayside Creations to help further spread the word.

Legend of Grimrock is the product of an interesting and unprecedented relationship between rights holders and creators. We’ve seen crowdfunding campaigns based on pre-existing intellectual property, in which the creators of the fan film or series either couldn’t make a profit on their work (as was the case with Wayside’s very own Fallout: Nuka Break) or were served with notices to cease and desist funding and production (like what happened with the promising and short-lived Dark Knight: Legacy

We’ve also seen intellectual property holders enlist online video creators to bring their video game characters and story lines to real-action life (like with Halo: Forward Unto Dawn and Dragon Age: Redemption).

But this is the first time we’ve seen a crowdfunding campaign for a fan film or series fully endorsed by the intellectual property holder. And judging on the amount Wayside Creations was able to raise, there’s definitely an appetite for more of this kind of collaboration.

The campaign on Kickstarter for Legend of Grimrock raised $121,649 among 1,285 backers. The series will debut sometime later this year.