Oh cool, he finally finished it! Hadean Lands was kickstarted five years ago [1], receiving $31337. (Read that number carefully; this article rounds to $30k and completely misses the fun.) At the time, it was astonishing to many people that a piece of interactive fiction could pull in five figures of crowdfunding.

Andrew Plotkin has been releasing really excellent games for years; Spider and Web was my introduction to interactive fiction. (Talk about getting thrown in the deep end of the genre...)

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-inter...

EDIT: The game's author has, for some years, been posting Hadean Lands design and progress notes at the Gameshelf blog: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/author/author6b0d4/