It’s Time To Get Ready For The Public Domain Game Jam

Yes, it’s that time of year again! We’re gearing up for the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve been running these game jams ever since 2019, when new works began entering the public domain in the US for the first time in over two decades, as a way to highlight the creativity that comes from a robust and growing public domain. Starting on January 1st, 2025, we’ll be doing it again to celebrate works from 1929 that are finally losing their copyright protection after nearly a century.

As in past years, we’re calling on designers of all stripes to create both analog and digital games that build on works entering the public domain. There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:

• Written works by Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, Mahatma Gandhi, Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Virginia Woolf
• Art by Salvador Dalí, Edward Hopper, Frieda Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, René Magritte
• Films including Blackmail, The Cocoanuts, The Skeleton Dance, St. Louis Blues
• Music by Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Cole Porter,  Bessie Smith, Thomas “Fats” Waller
• Other characters including Buck Rogers, Popeye, and Tintin

And that list only scratches the surface – there are lots more 1929 works, from the famous to the obscure, and we even have a prize for the best game with an obscure and unexpected source of inspiration.

If you’re interested in games, the public domain, or both, we encourage you to get involved – whether or not you have any experience as a game designer. 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.

The game jam will run through the month of January, 2025 and at the end we’ll be choosing winners in six categories, and awarding a choice of prizes from Techdirt and Diegetic Games. You can read the full rules and other details, and sign up to participate, on the game jam page over on Itch.io. Every year we’ve been blown away by the creativity on display from designers who enter the jam, and we know this year will be no different! See you in January, when Gaming Like It’s 1929 begins.