GARDEN OF DELIGHTS: JB500 OPENS CALL FOR HIERONYMUS BOSCH-INSPIRED GAMES

As a tyke, I had the extreme fortune of having at my disposal a number of art-history survey textbooks (thanks, dad) which I pored over daily — an early, self-guided & very valuable education in art appreciation — and I have very distinct memories of continually returning to one artist: Hieronymus Bosch, whose landscapes were littered with cartoonish-ly caricatured monsters, animals and half-humans that wouldn’t at all be out of place in a children’s TV show if they weren’t so overtly representative of grim morality tales.

It’s with that said that I count myself super lucky to having been asked to be involved with a new art/game initiative from the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation itself — an organization founded to honor the artist on the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death.

The foundation has just announced its open call to all game designers to pitch new ideas inspired by Bosch’s work through the end of 2012, which will then be narrowed down to five finalists, who will each receive €2500 to prototype their game. One of those five will be chosen as the winner, who’ll get assistance to complete the work and officially present it internationally along with the rest of the 500-year happenings.

The jury panel, other than myself and Bosch 500 Foundation artistic manager Adriaan ‘s-Gravesande, includes Global Game Jam co-director Zuraida Buter, Hide&Seek New York managing director (and my old boss at Edge magazine!) Margaret Robertson, and Proteus creator Ed Key.

To investigate further and pitch your own idea — which I genuinely hope errs more toward interesting ideas like, “what does a videogame in triptych feel like” and less “a modern FPS/third-person-adventure set in the hellscape of Earthly Delights” — visit the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation’s game competition site.