Gaming Like It’s 1927: The Game Jam Has Begun!

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »

A new year has begun, and with it, a new edition of our annual public domain game jam! This year, it’s Gaming Like It’s 1927! There’s a host of exciting new works that just entered the public domain in the US, and we’re calling on game designers with every level of experience, or none, to use that wealth of material to create new digital and analog games. Here are just some of the works that are now available to the public:

• Novels, short stories, and poems by Agatha Christie, Baroness Orczy, Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust, Upton Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf plus the first three The Hardy Boys books
• Art by Ansel Adams, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Tamara de Lempicka
• Films including The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Napoléon, and Trolley Troubles
• Music by Béla Bartók, Ira and George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, Ruth Etting, and Sophie Tucker

Check out Duke’s Public Domain Day article or Copyright Lately’s round-up for more works entering the public domain.

You can check out the game jam page on Itch.io to sign up and view the full rules, but the most important rule is simple: your game must be based on or incorporate materials from one or more 1927 works that have entered the public domain this year. The jam is open until the end of the month, and we have some great prizes for the winners in six different categories.

For inspiration, you can check out the winners of the jams for 1923, 1924, 1925 and 1926. Every year, entrants have done amazingly creative and unexpected things with the material, and we can’t wait to see what you bring to the table for the latest jam. So go sign up and start designing!