It sounded like a match made in heaven. The creators of Parappa and Gitaroo coming together for a new game. Sadly, the crowd did not want to fund the rhythm and rap game.

It should have been a slam dunk. The creators of two cult classic rhythm games came together to create a new, original, rhythm game. Sadly, it was not meant to be, at least not yet. The Kickstarter campaign for Project Rap Rabbit failed, falling well below its goal of $1.1M. So does this mean the game is going into the trash can? Not necessarily.

In a final Kickstarter update, the developers had this to say about the journey so far:

We've always considered ourselves fortunate to have some of the greatest gaming fans and communities on our side, but over the past month we've been more humbled than ever by your support. We've received hundreds of messages, scores of fan art submissions and more social media love and well-wishes than we can possibly keep on top of during our Project Rap Rabbit campaign. To each and every person who has helped and followed our journey, we thank you. Your excitement for Project Rap Rabbit has been wonderful to behold, but today we must sadly accept that our crowd-funding journey must end here. We knew that sourcing funds for a high-quality rhythm-action game would be tough, and though we knew that Project Rap Rabbit would be an incredible game, unfortunately we weren't able to do enough to prove that to the wider world.

A failed Kickstarter is not a death warrant, however. It's not a condition of a campaign that if the project fails it has be taken out back behind the tool shed and shot. There are always other crowd funding sites, and, even better, non-crowd-funding options. The funding they did receive at least proves that there is some interest, and allowed the team to likely create a proof of concept to show off to publishers. The team said that while they had nothing to show the public at E3, they did have a "very busy E3 filled with meetings about [their] vision for the future of rhythm-action," as said in their farewell post.

This goes to show that capitalizing on past glories and nostalgia doesn't always work with crowd funding. Perhaps there just wasn't enough of an audience out there to support the project, or perhaps consumers have just felt they've been burned too many times with Kickstarter games that succeeded, but upon launch were less than promised.

Whatever the future holds of Project Rap Rabbit, this hopefully won't be the last time minds behind Parappa the Rappa and Gitaroo Man collaborate together.

You can read their full farewell statement here.