Winner Spotlight News Today

Last week, we featured Hot Water in the first Winner Spotlight from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. This week, we're taking a closer look at the winner of the Best Deep Cut category, reserved for games that used 1924 material that doesn't appear on the popular lists of works entering the…

The Great Gatsby and the winner of the Best Digital Game category: From the name alone, you can probably guess what the game is: rhythm action games are a popular genre, and hey, why not make one for The Great Gatsby? The premise is presented as a joke, with the designer describing it as "the way F. Scott Fitzgerald would have wanted his legacy to be maintained" — but the game doesnt just lean on this one bit of amusing silliness, nor does it cut any corners in fulfilling its promise. Rathe...

Remembering Grußau is perhaps to call it a guided reflection on a piece of artwork — specifically, the 1925 painting of the same name by the Jewish surrealist painter Felix Nussbaum — and its meaning within the greater context of history, and the artists life and eventual murder in the Holocaust. The game is simple, focused, and highly effective in prompting the player to meaningfully engage with the subject matter in a deeply personal way. A big part of how it accomplishes this is by inv...

Both games were obvious contenders for the category, and ultimately it proved too difficult to choose one over the other, because they are so intriguingly similar yet completely different. Both could be described as "art puzzles", and both remix multiple public domain works, but neither clearly rises above the other. Art Apart is the more straightforward of the two: its just a plain old jigsaw puzzle game using a series of paintings from 1925 and a fairly unpolished interface. But while this me...

Last week, we took a look at ~THE GREAT GATSBY~, one of the recently-announced winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like Its 1925. Today, were moving on to our second spotlight, and looking at the winner of the Best Adaptation category, Best Adaptation is always an interesting category in these jams, because every entry is on some level an adaptation, but that doesnt mean they are all truly good candidates for the prize. Some make use of elements of a public domain work in a way th...