Loot Drop's ambitious "old school RPG" crowdfunding project "SHAKER" has been cancelled, with developers Brenda Braithwaite and Tom Hall calling time on the Kickstarter page with two weeks left on the dial.

The project peaked at over 7,600 backers, with pledges totalling almost a quarter million, but at its half-way point, it was only tracking toward half of it's US$1M goal.

Although the Kickstarter pledge functionality doesn't appear to be disabled at present, a solemn update on the project page explains their reasoning, and hints that we may not have heard the last of SHAKER.

Ultimately, our pitch just wasn't strong enough to get the traction we felt it needed to thrive. Sure, it may have made it. We could have fought our way to a possibly successful end. In reading your feedback and talking it over internally, however, we decided that it made more sense to kill it and come back with something stronger.

In game design, mercy killing is the law.

So, please accept our thanks and apologies in equal order. Expect something more soon.

Despite the developers' id Software and Wizardry heritage (and their notable avoidance of trumpeting infamous Doom and Daikatana veteran John Romero's involvement in the project), it seems that their concept, and credibility weren't enough to get SHAKER our of the shadow of the two other big old-school, PC-centric crowdfunding efforts running at the same time --particular Obsidian's very similar Project Eternity.