For the uninitiated, Deer Avenger 3 (also known as Deer Avenger 3D) was a PC game that parodied the popular Deer Hunter series and gave players the opportunity to take the fight to the hunters. Assuming the role of an anthropomorphic deer, players roam the wilderness looking for hunters to capture or kill. The game was released on PC in the early 2000s and was quite well received, but what nobody knew is that Westlake Interactive was apparently working on a Dreamcast port...and it's a pre-production GD of this very port that was found in a basement in New Jersey.
In the previous article I mentioned that several members of the Dreamcast community who are well versed in extracting game files from GDs were working with the disc's owner, but it now appears that this is not the case. Instead, wunderbreadv2 has set up a Go Fund Me in order to raise the sum of $1000 in order to release the game. At the time of writing, the campaign has received plenty of Facebook shares...but a total of $0 in donations. Now, allow me to be brutally honest on this whole thing: This Go Fund Me will probably not be funded, and the reasons are multiple.
I hope I'm proven wrong and somehow wunderbreadv2 gets the $1000 he's campaigning for, but the truth of the matter is that no matter how interesting the story is, the Dreamcast community is probably not going to stump up that kind of funding for an unknown quantity. Nobody knows what is on that disc - it could literally be a proof of concept demo or just a menu screen. Furthermore, this is Deer Avenger 3 we're discussing. It's not a Geist Force or some hitherto unknown port of Planet Harriers or Virtua Fighter 4. At best, it's likely to be a competent port of a PC game quite probably in an unfinished state.
For me though, the most annoying aspect to this whole saga is that multiple people in the community have offered their help for free. Their time and effort, with all of the required equipment, for no monetary compensation - people who know exactly how to extract the data on this GD and turn it into a bootable ISO in a mere matter of hours. All it would take is for wunderbreadv2 to send the disc to any one of the people who have offered help. At one point I thought the deal was done and people were communicating...but alas this isn't the case. If you read the Go Fund Me campaign, wunderbreadv2 is asking for money to acquire a System Disc 2 and an SD card reader, but what can't be bought with $1000 is the expertise required to put these ingredients together and come up with a bootable or playable ISO. It all seems a little muddled, even to someone like me who really isn't an expert when it comes to this type of thing. And then of course, the long shadow of the discovery and release (for free) of Millennium Racer still hangs over this topic.
You can find the Dreamcast Deer Avenger 3 Go Fund Me here.
