MATHEMATICAL: ADVENTURE TIME GAME JAM NEARS 500 SIGNUPS

The story of the Adventure Time Game Jam goes back, well, really until the point when Adventure Time first aired, and more or less everyone on earth simultaneously thought, “this would make the most amazing videogame of all time, even if I have zero idea how it would actually work,” well before it was announced that WayForward would be tackling their own upcoming Nintendo 3DS adventure.

Fast forward a few years, and, innocently reading Michael Deforge‘s brilliant guest-work in an issue of the Adventure Time comic, I had a flash. The reason there can never be one perfect, definitive Adventure Time game is that there needs to be hundreds of Adventure Time games. Just like in Deforge’s version of the Land of Ooo, which includes a Breakfast Kingdom that’s never before been mentioned or otherwise existed, the magic of Adventure Time is that everything is permitted.

And so, wearing one of my other hats as a helper on Fantastic Arcade, the free indie-game celebrating offshoot of yearly genre film festival Fantastic Fest, hosted by the Alamo Drafthouse (aka unquestionably the best movie theater chain in the world), we set about to make it so.

Then, many, many months later, almost inconceivably, it really, actually happened: this weekend, September 13th-15th, Fantastic Arcade will be hosting the first ever official Adventure Time Game Jam, a 48 hour sprint open to any developer in the world, with the best of the playable entries getting their own cabinet at Fantastic Arcade itself the following weekend.

The amazing news: we’re rolling up on 500 people who’ve signed up to take part in the jam, which means that by this time next week, if everything goes as hoped, we could have several hundred new Breakfast Kingdom-esque playable realities that all make sense within the Adventure Time universe, even if they don’t follow what little shreds of canon actually exist within the TV show.

Even more exciting, the jam will be hosted on the Beautiful Mess Organizer, B.M.O. for short (heh!), a new game jam management platform we’ve teamed up with developer Brett Chalupa to help create, in the hopes of setting a new standard for organizing future game jams on the web. We’ll be taking a longer look at that in the future!

For now, you’ve got two more days to sign up for the jam yourself, and not too much longer before you can play all the new games for yourself both at home, and, for Austinites, at Fantastic Arcade, September 20th-23rd.