Kickstarter

It's still officially Day Two. Yesterday I was keeping my fingers crossed we might get to $8,000 by the end of the day. When I went to bed it had reached $11,000. I woke this morning to find we've passed $16,000 already! More than Half way! Still Day Two!

Words fail me. Thank you all so much. People I don't even know (yet) have pledged more than I'd expect from a billionaire. Maybe they're billionaires, although somehow I really doubt that. I'll find out who they are when I meet some of them for lunch. I wish I could meet all of you.

And thank you for the lovely comments, too (to which I'll reply shortly). Over the years quite a few people have written to me to say that Creatures influenced them in some way. Many took up university majors or even research careers in the biological or computing sciences because of things they'd discovered for themselves (or maybe even about themselves) by playing Creatures. When I was writing that game, the marketing people at one of the potential publishers told me to "bury the science." "People aren't interested in that sort of thing." Well, I have to tell them they were wrong: some people were interested. 

Anyway, I don't know what to say. Thank you seems too feeble. I'm just kind of sitting here with my mouth open...

Less than 24 hours into this and I'm already nearly a third of the way to my goal! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I've had some heart-stoppingly generous pledges to get this far so quickly, but I'm deeply grateful for every single show of support, from the smallest widow's mite upwards. Every penny really counts.

I'll tell you a secret. I'm not the most positive thinker on the planet, so I kind of go into things expecting it all to go wrong. That makes me a good programmer, as it happens, because programming is all about anticipating ways in which things might go wrong. It also makes me a good computational neuroscientist, because there's a huge difference between what looks like a decent theory on paper and what actually works in the real world, although at the same time I have to say I tend to be pretty bold about what I think I can achieve in this area, which is also a good thing. But it makes me really lousy at getting support for my work. So a lot of nails were bitten before I dared click the button to publish this project on Kickstarter. I kind of expected a big zero to be staring at me for days. So you have no idea how thrilled I am to see that this might actually work out. Thanks again to everyone who's given my project such a fantastic head-start.

- Steve