Blood Sport Is Probably the Worst Kickstarter Idea Ever

It takes a special kind of Kickstarter campaign to make this author feel squeamish, but as your humble host taps out this story, let it be known that his skin has turned a subtle shade of green. Blood Sport is quite possibly the most mind bogglingly terrible idea in the history of crowd funding – and it’s no surprise that the drive has already been shut down.

To be fair, there are some mildly honourable intentions here: Brand & Grotesque, a company comprising of a couple of “creative experts”, wanted to increase the number of blood donors, and their solution was to gamify the entire process. As such, they hoped to raise $250,000CAD to create some kind of gaming arena, which would be linked to a blood collecting machine.

The idea was that every time your controller rumbled – presumably through taking damage – the system would draw actual blood from your body, with a regulator preventing the device from taking too much based upon the player’s age, height, and other factors. Even with this failsafe in place, though, thinking about how much the average controller rumbles has this editor feeling sick.

The company eventually intended to partner with the “appropriate organisations” to tour its technology, and put on “blood donation gaming events”. Of course, it all sounds like the absolute worst idea ever, and has fortunately been shut down before ever really getting started. Bizarrely, it had raised $3,390CAD at the time of intervention.

We’ve always thought of ways in which the immersive nature of gaming could be enhanced, and have happened upon the idea of sensory emitters projecting smells out into the atmosphere before. While that in itself is a pretty darn terrible idea, though, the thought of actually drawing blood based on controller rumble – well, this scribe’s probably going to heave.