The story of the American Corps of Discovery led by Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark is being turned into a role-playing game for Windows, Mac and Linux, and its developer, Sortsoft LLC, is turning to Kickstarter to get the game across the finish line.
Meriwether: An American Epic is based on the voyage of Lewis and Clark as they ventured across the U.S. in the early 1800s under the orders of President Thomas Jefferson to map out the rest of America. The 28-month journey involved a hand-picked party of soldiers, interpreters and hunters, and when players dive into the game's world they'll find that, like Lewis and Clarke, they'll have to form the Corps of Discovery themselves and undertake the tasks of the Corps.
Players will have to achieve the following goals:
- Find an all-water route across North America, if one exists
- Draw accurate maps of your voyage
- Establish peaceful relations with as many Native American nations as you can
- Identify plants and animals unknown to Western science
- Make it back alive
The development team is working with historians in order to achieve historic accuracy in the game and, with grants from Humanities Iowa and Humanities Montana, they've been able to get quite far into development.
Meriwether's Kickstarter campaign asks for $35,000. At the time of writing $7,419 has been raised with 33 days to go. The game has received the support of Eric Zimmerman (NYU Game Lab) and Richard Lemarchand (Uncharted series). Additional details on the game and the backer rewards can be viewed here.
