It’s a new year, and that means new works are entering the public domain, and that means it’s time for the latest installment of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929!
If you’ve been itching to get started on your entry, now’s the time — you’ve got until the end of the month to make an analog or digital game based on works from 1929 that entered the public domain today. For more information and some examples of works you could draw from, check out our announcement post and the game jam page on Itch. We’ll bring you more updates throughout the month, and then in February we’ll be choosing winners in six categories (check out last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts if you need some more inspiration!)
We can’t wait to see what you come up with — good luck, and happy New Year/Public Domain Day!
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.
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.
A small tabletop roleplaying game is an excellent project to undertake for a jam like this, as putting one together requires nothing more than a clear theme and some written rules, but that doesn’t mean making a good one is easy. To stand out, such a game needs to shine in at least one way whether that’s highly engaging written content for the setting and characters, or rich and interesting rules that suggest gameplay depth, or — as is often the most impressive, and as is the case with Lucienne Impala’s Letters to Cthulhu — a creative and clever core mechanic that brings the entire thing into focus.
The game, which is based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name and the broader mythos of his works, puts players in the shoes (or robes) of Cthulhu cultists trying to communicate with their dark god. There’s a thematic core that’s essential to this kind of Lovecraftian story and setting: a roiling mixture of ambition, avarice, fear, power, awe, and madness. Lovecraft explored these themes through dozens of stories, while the game takes them on in a mere ten pages of rules.
The game is simple: one player takes on the role of Cthulhu, and will serve as the judge of the outcome, while the rest are tasked with composing the letter that will be judged. The group’s goal is to bring Cthulhu forth into the world, but each cultist is also randomly assigned a secret desire of their own, and each contributes just one sentence to the letter as it’s passed around the group. And there’s a twist: each cultist also has a specific way in which they can alter the previous sentence.
How they use this power (and if they use it at all) is up to them — will they try to manipulate the letter to ensure their own desires are fulfilled, or try to stymie the greed of others and keep the group on track towards its shared goal? Perhaps both, or neither. It becomes a monstrously corrupted game of telephone, where every link in the chain matters. The balance of desires in the final letter will determine the outcome, as the player representing Cthulhu uses a few simple rules (and a lot of freeform narrative creativity) to decide the fate that befalls the group and each individual.
The game is designed to move relatively quickly so it can be played more than once, each time with different players taking on the role of Cthulhu and different desires for all the cultists, and it’s best played with a larger group of 6-8 people. The tense, paranoid, conniving dynamic the game creates is subtle and specific to its source material, and is successfully established by just a few pages of rules that anyone can learn in moments. That kind of design elegance is always worth of note, and earns Letters to Cthulhu the title of Best Analog Game.
And that’s a wrap on this year’s winner spotlights. A huge thanks to everyone who submitted a game this year! We’ll be back next January, as always, with Gaming Like It’s 1929 —and whether you’ve entered the jam before or are thinking about doing it for the first time, it’s never too early to start exploring the many great works that will be entering the public domain in 2025.
Most of the submissions we receive in these jams come from solo designers, but this game is a powerful demonstration of what a small team can accomplish. By splitting up the tasks (Javi Muhrer did the programming, Chris Muhrer designed the levels, and McCoy Khamphouy created the art) were able to achieve something fairly rare in the jam: a complete video game, built from the ground up with all original elements. Based on the early American picture book of the same name by Wanda Gag, Millions of Cats is a classic puzzle platformer that offers everything you’d expect from such a title: a clever core mechanic that’s easy to understand and seems simple at first, but which must be used in increasingly creative and thoughtful ways through a series of increasingly challenging levels.
As the player, you control the character described in the original book only as “the very old man”, who is plagued and/or blessed by avid followers in the form of unlimited cats. With a button press, you can spawn more and more cats to trail behind you and copying your actions, and though you can’t control them directly, with some clever movement you can maneuver them to press buttons and help you reach the end of each level. Your score can be increased by using as few cats as possible, adding a great “find the true solution” challenge that gives puzzle games like this more replay value.
After a couple of levels, it quickly becomes clear how this mechanic can easily serve as the engine for all kinds of puzzles. That alone would be a satisfying prototype and more than enough for a game jam entry — the kind of thing a solo developer could pull off too. But this small team didn’t stop there. By having a dedicated level designer, they were able to include a pretty full slate of levels (I’m not quite sure of the final count, as I didn’t get to the end!) that explore several aspects of the core mechanic. Level design is so critical to puzzle platformers like this, so it really pays off. And while all this could have been presented with placeholder graphics or something generic, instead we get handcrafted original sprites and backgrounds, and even a custom title treatment for the game.
Overall, this is probably the most ambitious video game project we’ve had as an entry in these game jams, and it absolutely lives up to that ambition. That’s a testament not just to the skill and talent of the individual designers, but also to their ability to organize and coordinate a development project like this while each focuses on their area of expertise. It’s no surprise that Millions of Cats is this year’s Best Digital Game.
As you probably know, David has been a repeat winner in this jam ever since his first entry, and Solar Storm 1928 continues his track record of submitting games that blow our mind with their creativity and uniqueness. It’s a tabletop game that forges a connection between two very different works from 1928: Buckminster Fuller’s design for the Dymaxion House (a futuristic home design that sought to “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input”) and a huge collection of sketches from astronomers at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, documenting solar storm activity. Some of Fuller’s sketches just scream out to be used as game board, so that’s where things begin: with each player designing their own Dymaxion House by placing the walls and furniture on the floorplan, already outfitted with some futuristic fixtures.
Next, the true game begins, as the players subject each others’ houses to acute damage caused by solar activity across a series of rounds, while struggling to keep their own houses together by making repairs, rearranging doors and furniture, installing reflectors, and utilizing special tools like the bathroom fogger and vacuum pump. This is already enough for an extremely cool game about Fuller’s design — you could have players rolling dice or using some other simple source of randomness to determine the amount of damage. But this is where Solar Storm 1928 goes a step further, and reaches for a true deep-cut public domain source. The amount of damage that players must contend with is instead generated by having each turn represent a day of the year (players can begin the game on any date they choose), then pulling the actual documented solar storm activity for that day from the collection of Mt. Wilson Observatory sketches. A simple analytic process laid out in the rules translates each sketch into a number of damaged tiles for the round.
As play proceeds, the player grids fill up with damage and alterations, until one house fails entirely at which point all the houses get scores based on how they held up.
As with all the designer’s past winning games, Solar Storm 1928 isn’t just mechanically interesting, it’s also a thoughtful and playful reflection on the works it draws from. This time, the game also includes a full separate booklet of Designer Notes, discussing and explaining the origin and nature of this reflection: inspired by visits to old observatories and a fascination with their handwritten records, leading to the discovery of the sunspot sketches which in turn sparked thoughts of architecture and engineering. The game then emerged as a way to explore “the tension between the idea of the universe being difficult, and humans trying to make up for it.” For succeeding wonderfully in this reflection while offering fun and engaging gameplay, all grown from the seed of some technical drawings in an observatory’s archives, Solar Storm 1928 is this year’s Best Deep Cut.
Although Steamboat Willie gets all the attention, there were actually several early cartoons that entered the public domain this year, and what better way to compete for the Best Remix award than by using a whole bunch of them in a game? That’s exactly what The Burden of Creation does, using images clipped from several 1928 animated shorts including and especially the early appearances of KoKo the Clown from Fleischer Studios, alongside multiple Disney releases, and putting them all together in a mysterious and moody walking simulator.
It’s tough to capture good screenshots of the game, as its pixelated low-res aesthetic only really work in motion, and the exact quality of graphics seems to vary for different players — but some animated GIFs provided by the designer convey the feel:
The game starts with the player outdoors, moving towards a strange building, and soon you’ll find yourself wandering its gloomy gray hallways and encountering various characters and tableaus clipped from cartoons. Some scenes have intriguing dialogue, some doors are locked, some hallways have strange signs on the walls, and soon it becomes clear there’s a mystery hiding in this place.
The player can unravel that mystery by engaging in some light puzzle-esque gameplay, which will result in some surprising revelations and striking changes in scenery — but I don’t want to give too much away, as it’s best experienced firsthand at the game’s slow and thoughtful pace, underscored by period-appropriate music that seals the dreary atmosphere. For those who don’t want to play but would like to see it unfold, two different commenters on Itch linked to videos of their own full playthroughs.
As we continue to see works from the era of early American animation enter the public domain each year, there will always be some entries that capture the lion’s share of attention, none moreso than Steamboat Willie. So it’s great to see a designer casting a wider net like this, shining a spotlight on some other great cartoons, and putting them all together in such an intriguing way. For that, The Burden Of Creation is this year’s Best Remix.
Best Adaptation is probably the subtlest category in these jams: it’s reserved for the game we think did the best or most interesting job of truly “adapting” a newly public domain work by bringing its original spirit into the medium of games, rather than just being inspired by it or using material from it. Personally, I didn’t really think about Steamboat Willie as a prime candidate for that kind of adaptation, but then along came Mickey Party — a tabletop party game unabashedly inspired by the famous Mario Party video games, and embodied with the spirit of the cartoon it’s based on.
So what is the spirit of Steamboat Willie? I’d sum it up in one word: antics. Like other cartoons of the era, and like the works of Buster Keaton and other silent comedians that inspired them, the plot exists to take the characters from one amusing antic to the next, with each scene sporting its own comedic premise and jam-packed with action and visual interest. Mickey Party does the exact same thing: players roll dice to move along the board trying to collect enough “notes” to earn a “song”, and enough songs to win, in the course of which they stumble into a series of fast-paced minigames for the whole group to play. Each minigame is directly based on one of the scenes from the cartoon: it’s a series of animated antics, in game form.
And oh yeah: it’s a lot of fun. Players will be making paper footballs, peeling oranges, stacking cups, and more. They’ll be engaging in a few other layers of gameplay too, all equally centered on material from the cartoon, such as buying a variety of ludicrous items from the shop to gain different bonuses.
So there you have it: a cartoon, in game form. What more can I say? Pulling that off is more than enough for Mickey Party to earn the title of Best Adaptation.
Congratulations to Benjamin Gray for the win! You can download everything you need to play Mickey Party (minus the aforementioned dice, cups, and citrus fruits) from its page on Itch. plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.
Earlier this week, we announced the winners of the 6th annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! Now, as in years past, for the next few Saturdays we’ll be featuring spotlight posts taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). Today, we’re kicking things off with the Best Visuals winner, Flight from Podunk Station by onamint.
Based on Steamboat Willie, this year’s big entrant into the public domain, Flight from Podunk Station is a short RPG that puts a dark twist on Mickey Mouse and his pals, casting them as gangsters on a midnight run aboard their boat. Of all the entries in the jams so far, this probably has the most original artwork we’ve ever seen. Right off the bat, you’re introduced to the main cast of characters, each sporting a beautifully drawn portrait.
And as you can see, it’s not just the portraits: the background and the text and the whole interface looks fantastic, immediately coming together to set the tone of the game, helped out by the simple and striking color scheme of greyscale art with red accents. Pretty soon, you’ll be having violent encounters on the river, and getting introduced to a variety of wonderfully twisted enemy designs:
The mechanics of the game are straightforward, consisting of a little bit of resource management and plenty of classic turn-based combat. By the designer’s own admission, the gameplay needs more refinement and balance, but that was a worthwhile sacrifice on the game jam timeline since it let so much love go towards the artwork. In a comment on Itch, the designer explains a bit more about the process for the artwork: the characters were all drawn from scratch then gussied up by digitally applying some paper textures, while the background uses a heavily-modified photo, and the interface combines original elements with a few modified third-party icons. The result of this combination is a huge success, and goes to show how smart use of various assets is almost as important as artistic ability when trying to make a good-looking game as a solo developer. Just one look at almost any screen from the game (and there are plenty more that you should go play to see for yourself) makes it obvious why Flight from Podunk Station is this year’s winner for Best Visuals.
