A game jam is a deadline with a theme attached. Participants hear a word or a phrase, then have a weekend, sometimes a day, sometimes a week, to turn it into a playable game. What comes out is rough, and that is the point. “The thing that stops a lot of people making games is expectations about levels of polish, about a certain level of quality,” the developer Anna Anthropy told Edge in 2013. With only hours to work, she said, you stop caring about any of that: “You just have to keep making it if you want to get it done.”
The format is young by the standards of this Vault. Wireframe traces the modern game jam to March 2002. Eleven years later Edge reported that “hardly a weekend passes without one somewhere in the world”, large studios were running their own, and some of the best-known independent games of the 2010s had started life as a weekend entry.
Fast facts
- First: Indie Game Jam 0, Oakland, California, March 2002: 14 participants, twelve games, four days.
- Oldest online jam: Ludum Dare, from April 2002.
- Largest: the Global Game Jam, organised from 2008 and first held in January 2009; 42,811 participants at 803 sites in 108 countries in 2018.
- Typical length: 48 hours; Ludum Dare’s team Jam runs 72.
- Games that began at jams: Galcon, Canabalt, Thomas Was Alone, Evoland, Super Hexagon, Surgeon Simulator 2013, Superhot, Titan Souls, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
Where it started
Chris Hecker and Sean Barrett held Indie Game Jam 0 in Oakland in March 2002. Wireframe describes 14 participants “crammed into a tiny office space” for four days, and twelve games, among them Angry God Bowling, in which you knock over crowds of people with a gigantic ball, and Worship, a religious riff on Missile Command.
A few weeks later Geoff Howland dared the members of his online game-development forum to make a game from scratch in 24 hours. That became Ludum Dare, and it differed from Oakland in one important way: it happened online, so anyone anywhere could take part, and entrants voted on each other’s games. Ludum Dare has run two or three main events a year ever since, and only in April and October since 2019. By 2013 Edge called it “perhaps the bestknown game jam in the world”, after “11 years and 26 events”, with “thousands of games per event”.
The Global Game Jam
The Global Game Jam took Oakland’s in-person format and ran it everywhere at once. Edge dates its founding to 2008; Wireframe, quoting its executive director Seven Siegel, puts its first event in 2009, with 1,650 participants at 53 locations. The two fit together: the organisation was set up in 2008 and held its first jam at the start of 2009. It has run every January since, on the same weekend and to the same theme at every site. A committee picks the theme in secret, and Siegel said that even he did not know it before the keynote: “Personally, the more abstract, the better, for me.”
It grew quickly. Edge counted 16,705 developers from 63 countries at the 2013 event, who made 3,248 games between them. Siegel gave Wireframe the 2018 figures: “42,811 participants across 803 locations in 108 countries”. The event had reached places such as Kenya and Kazakhstan, and he said it had started “entire game development communities”.
What a jam is for
The people who take part mostly talk about finishing. The designer Harry Lee, whose team’s Midas won four medals at Ludum Dare 22 in 2011, told Edge that jams “motivate developers to actually finish a project. That helps a lot of people, since they fall into a trap of not ever finishing a thing, or even starting a thing.” He also valued the pile of work that builds up: “I have dozens of game prototypes that I’ve produced from jams, and I think that body of work is necessary for finding a style that suits you.”
Lee also warned that a single fixed format produces a single kind of game. “Every game jam, the way it is set up and the format it has, will directly lead to the kinds of games that come out of it.” Edge found jams that bent the rules on purpose. Molyjam, in 2012, took its ideas from a parody Twitter account, @PeterMolydeux, so entrants knew their brief in advance. The 7 Day FPS challenge, organised by Vlambeer’s Jan Willem Nijman with Sos Sosowski and Sven Bergstrom, gave a week to a genre that Nijman said indies tended to dismiss. At the other extreme, the Klik of the Month Klub gave developers two hours.
Jams also asked a question about work. Studios were starting to hold their own, and Edge wondered whether a jam was “just crunching taken to its inevitable conclusion”. The people it interviewed drew a line between them. For Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, both exhaust you, but “a jam’s self-imposed and a creative exploration”, while crunch is “a final tour de force to do something that probably should’ve been done two months ago”. Siegel, in Wireframe, called jams “soul-giving” and crunch time “soul-taking”.
From jam to shop
A jam entry is a prototype that someone has already played. Many of them grew into commercial games:
| Game | Began as | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Galcon | Phil Hassey’s entry for Ludum Dare 8 | Edge 254 |
| Canabalt | Adam Saltsman’s game for the Experimental Gameplay Project’s “bare minimum” month, 2009 | Edge 254 |
| Thomas Was Alone | Mike Bithell’s personal 24-hour jam, 2010 | Edge 254 |
| Super Time Force | a game made at the Toronto Game Jam (TOJam), 2011 | Edge 254 |
| Evoland | Nicolas Cannasse’s Compo entry for Ludum Dare 24, 2012 | Ludum Dare |
| Super Hexagon | Terry Cavanagh’s Hexagon, made in a 48-hour jam for the 2012 Pirate Kart | Edge 254 |
| Surgeon Simulator 2013 | Bossa Studios’ entry for the 2013 Global Game Jam | Edge 254, Wireframe 15 |
| Superhot | an entry for the 7 Day FPS challenge, August 2013 | Wikipedia |
| Titan Souls | a Jam entry for Ludum Dare 28, December 2013 | Ludum Dare |
| Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes | Steel Crate Games’ Global Game Jam idea | Wireframe 15 |
Large studios used the format to find ideas of their own. Double Fine first held its two-week Amnesia Fortnight as stress relief during the long development of Brütal Legend; the first two produced Costume Quest, Stacking, Once Upon a Monster and Trenched, also known as Iron Brigade. Frontier Developments ran “Game of the Week” jams for its staff, which produced the WiiWare game LostWinds. Goat Simulator began as a studio’s internal jam project. At Ubisoft Montreal, a programme called 50 New Things gave the Assassin’s Creed III team eight Fridays to prototype their own ideas, some of which ended up in the game as side quests.
Sources
- Edge issue 254, June 2013, pp. 88–93, feature on game jams: Anna Anthropy on polish; Ludum Dare’s “11 years and 26 events”; the Global Game Jam “founded in 2008” and its 2013 figures (16,705 developers, 63 countries, 3,248 games); Harry Lee on finishing and on formats; Molyjam, 7DFPS and the Klik of the Month Klub; Rami Ismail on jams and crunch; Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight and Ubisoft’s 50 New Things; Galcon, Canabalt, Thomas Was Alone, Super Time Force, Super Hexagon, Midas and Surgeon Simulator 2013.
- Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, pp. 44–47, “Time Crisis: The creative benefits of game jams” by Andrew Fisher: Indie Game Jam 0; the founding of Ludum Dare; the Global Game Jam’s first event in 2009 and its 2018 figures; Seven Siegel on themes, crunch, Surgeon Simulator and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes; Frontier’s LostWinds; Goat Simulator; Amnesia Fortnight.
- Ludum Dare event pages for Ludum Dare 24 and 28 (ldjam.com, accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Evoland and Titan Souls. See the Ludum Dare entry for its full sources.
- Wikipedia, “Superhot” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): its origin in the August 2013 7 Day FPS challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhot