Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games’ Star Citizen continues to make the case that video game spaceships are an extremely effective crowdfunding opportunity, with the recent announcement that the game surpassed $75 million in crowdfunded support. This amount, and the general fanfare surrounding the upcoming game has led to it winning South By South West’s (SXSW) Most Anticipated Crowdfunded Game of the Year.

Currently, Star Citizen is still in development—although certain components of the game are playable in a limited fashion—but this has not stopped future players from buying into the crowdfunding campaign by pre-ordering spaceships and packages that range in price tag from $45 (for a starter ship) to $15,000 (which includes pretty much everything).

Chris Roberts described the $75 million funding windfall of Star Citizen as surreal when speaking to gaming news site IGN.

“I’m always amazed. If you came up to me and said that we would be at $75 million when I started October 2012, I would be absolutely nuts,” Roberts said. “I used to have some arguments internally where the head of marketing was like ‘Well, we’ll see if we can do [$20 million]’ and I was like, ‘Ahh, there’s no way we’re doing [$20 million].’ So, it has been pretty awesome.”

Original plans for the game aimed for $10 million from private investors and only $2-4 million from crowdfunding. That $2 million was exceeded entirely by the initial Kickstarter campaign in November 2012, and the money just kept pouring in. By March 2014 the project reached $40 million and December 2014 it soared past $66 million. Soon it felt like the continual upward scale of the money would exhaust the media in attempting to report on it—but apparently not yet the fans.

To celebrate the $75 million, Star Citizen’s team produced a five-minute long montage for SXSW.

It is a breathtakingly beautiful series of video clips that convey the width and breadth of the project which connects space flight and human-to-human interaction on the ground. The space flight aspect of Star Citizen receives a great deal of attention in that there’s dog fighting, flight simulation, cargo hauling, dog fighting etc. But the on-the-ground avatar aspect of the game opens it up to having first person shooter elements as well as face-to-face trades and the social experience of being able to walk through a star port.

The video also features spine-tingling music orchestrated by composer Pedro Macedo Camacho. Make sure to crank up the volume and get swept away.

The upcoming game also teases advancements in graphics and artificial intelligence to produce lifelike combatants for dog fights as well as urban spaces with virtual people who react to their environment provided by Moon Collider.

Winning Most Anticipated Crowdfunded Game of the Year seems a forgone conclusion with the $75 million under Star Citizen’s belt. Since 2012 it has been gaining in popular momentum as well as funding with each milestone passing with surprising ease.

The game is expected to arrive in six separate releases of different types of content (both space and FPS) and is slated for a full commercial launch in 2016.

Image credit: Cloud Imperium Games Star Citizen screenshot from “Star Citizen SXSW Video Montage“