The Public Domain Game Jam Starts Next Week!

As we announced earlier this month, we’re once again celebrating the new year with the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! With 2025 just a few days away, it’s time to get ready. Whether you’re an experienced game designer, a total newbie, or anything in between, we want you to dive into works from 1929 that are exiting copyright protection this year and use them to build something new and exciting.

Maybe your game is a faithful adaptation of a classic, a celebration of an underappreciated gem, an ironic reimagining of an iconic work, or a madcap remix of a dozen sources — or something else entirely. Past winners include everything from a Great Gatsby platformer to a roleplaying game based on an ornithology magazine, and we’re constantly amazed by the ideas people come up with.

This year, there are lots of interesting works to choose from, some of which are listed on the game jam page on Itch. But any list can only scratch the surface, and is usually focused on more well-known works. For those who want to dive a bit deeper, I recommend searching the Internet Archive’s text archives filtered by publication year of 1929, where you can find everything from pulpy genre fiction magazines full of original illustrations to seemingly unremarkable catalogues and trade journals that contain hidden depths.

Whatever work(s) you choose, the game jam is open to both analog and digital games of all kinds (though digital games must be playable in the browser). There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

You can check out the full rules and sign up now on Itch. The jam officially begins on January 1st and runs through to the end of the month, after which we’ll be awarding prizes in six categories. We can’t wait to see what you come up with this year.