Gaming Like It's 1924: Check Out The Entries In Our Public Domain Game Jam

from the the-games-are-in dept

At the beginning of the year, we launched our second public domain game jam to encourage designers to explore all the new works exiting copyright protection in the US and turn them into new analog and digital games — and as of this month, the submissions are in! Our panel of judges is hard at work play checking out all the great games, and while they try to determine a winner, you can check them out too.

Though we didn't get as many submissions as last year (after all, this wasn't the historic year in which new works began entering the public domain for the first time in a long time) the quality and creativity of this year's lineup is off the charts. You can play them all at our itch.io page, including things like: a deck-building card game about Charlemagne based on the paintings of N. C. Wyeth, a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game based on The Most Dangerous Game, a game about remixing the art of Wassily Kandinsky, and rules for a free-form LARP based on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, among many others.

We'll bring you more updates as our judges get closer to choosing winners in in our six categories: best analog game, best digital game, best visuals, best adaptation of a 1924 work, best remixing of multiple public domain works, and the best "deep cut" game based on something more obscure that isn't included in the popular lists of notable newly-public-domain works. Until then, get playing, and share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments!

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Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain


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  1. icon
    Samuel Abram (profile), 9 Feb 2020 @ 5:37pm

    Quantity is down, but Quality is up!

    My favorite of the batch of this year's game jam is You Are The Rats In The Walls based off of an H.P. Lovecraft short story published 96 years ago (I'm going to warn you, though, the Lovecraft story frequently uses a racial slur against African Americans, as it is a name of a cat. Yes, that racial slur. You know the one I'm talking about).

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 9 Feb 2020 @ 7:08pm

    Re: Quantity is down, but Quality is up!

    No Hamilton or blue shitting up the threads with their allergic reactions to the public domain either. This is fine.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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