Apocalypse Now Could Become a Video Game

Francis Ford Coppola’s bloody epic Apocalypse Now is nearly four decades old at this point, but it’s stood the test of time: it remains not only one of the most important and celebrated movies about the Vietnam War ever made, but also a timeless—and grim and sweeping and psychedelic—meditation on the depths to which humans can sink.

Sounds fun, right? Well, soon you could be able to put yourself in the action. A group of video game designers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a video game based on the motion picture.

They say it won’t be a traditional war-themed shooting game like Call of Duty but a “survival horror experience.” Coppola himself has backed the game, in which players will take the role of Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen in the film), the disenchanted, near insane army captain dispatched on a secret mission to find and kill the renegade Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has hidden himself deep in the jungle.

“You’ll have to make a lot of difficult decisions, and it’s not clear what the right decisions are at any given point in time,” Josh Sawyer, a designer working as a consultant to the project, says in a prospectus video on the Kickstarter page. Coppola also contributes a video message.

The game will be available on a “wide variety of platforms” by late 2020 should it come into fruition. The crowdfunding campaign has a goal of $900,000; within a day of its launch on Wednesday, more than $40,000 had been raised already.