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Freddie Wong’s “Video Game High School” sets Kickstarter record

Wong raised $800,000 for season 2 of the popular action series, shattering all previous funding records for film projects on Kickstarter.

 

Chase Hoffberger

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Posted on Feb 13, 2013   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 12:57 am CDT

YouTuber Freddie Wong celebrated a new feat this week when his Kickstarter campaign for Rocket Jump Studios’ “Video Game High School: Season Two” became the most funded film project ever to run through the site.

The campaign closed out after raising $808,341 from 10,613 backers, nearly $200,000 more than it had originally set out to pool together. “Video Game High School: Season Two” now holds the top spot on the Film & Video chart by almost $400,000; Blur Studio’s “The Goon” movie sits there as a distant second.

“Thank you to everybody who pledged and supported our project!” Wong wrote in an update posted late last week. “You are changing the rules of how indy filmmakers can fund their projects. We can’t do this without you, so thank you again for your generosity. Season Two is going to be incredible!”

Rocket Jump’s funding means that Wong and company will be able to put together a second season of the immensely popular series involving five best friends who grow up in an alternate reality where professional video gaming is the biggest spectator sport in the world.

The series closed out last month after nine episodes, all of which Rocket Jump Studios was able to produce through $273,725 of Kickstarter funding, but Wong, Matt Arnold, and company decided to revive it last month.

On Tuesday, Wong uploaded a blog post to the Rocket Jump sight saying that preliminary production had already begun on “Video Game High School: Season Two” and that the second season would revolve around the dynamics at the group’s school its competition with other schools. He also stressed that they’d be getting into the good part of production soon.

“As in the previous season, we’re saving all our action sequences for the end of the shoot,” Wong wrote. “We do this for a number of reasons, the primary of which is action scenes have a slight risk of injury to the actor, and we want to avoid the risk of having an actor sprain an ankle or something and need to halt production before dialogue sequences are shot.”

Photo via Freddiew/YouTube

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*First Published: Feb 13, 2013, 8:04 pm CST