Star Citizen: pledge your support by reserving an in-game spaceship

If you couldn't tell from our chat with Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts yesterday, we're quite excited about his latest project, the wildly ambitious Star Citizen. To recap, it's a persistent multiplayer space sim, with a single-player campaign that goes by a different name (Squadron 42). If any of those words make you want to throw money at your screen, you can now do so at Star Citizen's Kickstarter-esque pledge page .

Via a convincing video that sees Roberts wandering around an in-game ship, he urges you to pledge support for the game by reserving a spaceship, which you'll then be able to test-fly in the universe long before the game sees the light of day. Twelve months in, early backers will be able to play the "multiplayer space combat alpha", and nearly two years in they'll "get to play the Star Citizen space combat Beta, adventuring around the huge open galaxy, well before the general public." There are only 200,000 of these alpha slots, however, so you might want to get a wriggle on. Actually, 200,000 is quite a lot.

Roberts hopes to make at least $2 million in crowdfinding over the next 30 days, which even by recent standards is a hefty sum. If you're considering investing, make sure you watch this detailed video, where Roberts spells out the project in exhaustive detail, all while wearing a puffy bomber jacket.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.