Socks The Cat Rocks The Hill is on Kickstarter! If you love unreleased games, political satire and middle-of-the-road 16-bit platformers, you might just feel like all of your birthdays have arrived at once. For anyone else, there might be a bit of explaining to do.

Back in the Nineties, Realtime Associates was developing a platform game for Kaneko, based around Socks – a cat owned by Bill and Hillary Clinton, who at the time were occupying the White House. The SNES game made it as far as review, and critics agreed that it was pretty average but rather funny, thanks to its parodies of American political figures such as Richard Nixon, Ted Kennedy and Ross Perot. However, Kaneko’s US branch closed before the game could be released – something it may have had trouble with anyway, due to the politically sensitive nature of the game and Nintendo’s policies against such content at the time. Since then the game has been shrouded in mystery and controversy, with questions over how complete the game was when it was cancelled, whether or not the single known prototype would ever be released, and how that should be done.

Second Dimension now has a $30,000 Kickstarter campaign up, with ROM images being offered for a $20 contribution, physical cartridges for $40 and fully boxed copies for $75. The company has apparently gained the legal rights to release the game, and has employed a programmer to iron out bugs and tidy up the game. At present, the campaign is only offering NTSC cartridges.

The campaign is currently at $13,782 and is scheduled to run until November 8th. For more information and to back the campaign, click here.