In November 2010, Phosphor Games was quietly shopping around a project called Awakened, a super-hero action title heavy on character customization and creative chaos. As part of its publisher pitch, Phosphor made a demo video for Awakened; it was rough and never meant for public consumption. It showed a city on the brink of man-made annihilation, tanks patrolling streets littered with blood, bodies and fire, and a cast of seemingly ordinary people with supernatural abilities: invisibility, force push, mind control, electric shock, on-demand armor, stealth, accuracy, a tornado.

In January 2011, the video leaked.

"We didn't actually intend it to go out," Phosphor Games director Chip Sineni looks back on the day the video broke on YouTube. "We were kind of embarrassed because it was very rough and there was a lot of stuff that just wasn't ready to show to the public. We were really surprised by how many people were supportive of it."

The video, rough as Sineni thought it was, resonated with the gaming audience in a big way. Publishers loved it, too - just not enough to pick up the project. Awakened fell to the back of Phosphor's priorities and out of the gaming industry's eye as the company focused on developing smaller, lucrative games, such as Horn and Dark Meadow for iOS. However, in the few years since Awakened burst into public consciousness, video game funding has evolved, and Phosphor may not need publisher approval to get the game off the ground. All it needs now is something it believes it has already proven - community interest - and somewhere to channel that support.

Awakened has turned to Kickstarter.