Project Rap Rabbit was positioned as a brand new music-rhythm game from legendary creators within the genre: PaRappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura and Gitaroo Man creator Keiichi Yano. The game was put up on Kickstarter roughly a month ago and sadly they didn’t reach their funding goal.
The creators were hoping to raise $1.1 million to develop the game for PC and PlayStation 4, with a Nintendo Switch version at $1.5 million. They only raised £161,557, or roughly $204,822 – less than 20% of its hopeful goal.
Despite the fact that the game didn’t reach its goal, the creators are looking to continue development in any way they can, even under a traditional publisher.
“While you didn’t see Project Rap Rabbit at any conferences or booths during E3 week, we had a very, very busy E3 filled with meetings about our vision for the future of rhythm-action,” the studio noted in their postmortem Kickstarter update.
Many fans speculated the game’s crowdfunding running into this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo buried it under all the announcements – a stark comparison to Shenmue III literally being announced during Sony’s 2015 E3 press conference, alongside a Kickstarter campaign that launched at the same time.
Other commentators pointed to the game being seemingly quite early in development – later in the campaign some prototype footage was released and while promising, the game had a ways to go before it reflected the concept art and mock gameplay screenshots shown in the beginning.
“Though our Kickstarter campaign hasn’t gone the way we’d intended, our early stages of development have left us more determined than ever to bring Project Rap Rabbit to life,” the update continued. The team finished up with a pretty optimistic message that the game’s development will carry on:
“From all of us here at iNiS J and NanaOn-Sha, thank you again for your journeying with us. We sincerely hope this isn’t the last time you’ll hear of Project Rap Rabbit.”
Should Project Rap Rabbit resurface and see its development continued, you’ll hear about it first here on Niche Gamer – we’ll keep you guys posted.
