~/../ A Game By Its Cover


The Famicase Game Jam

Some other places you might be looking for:

For more information about our jam and its history, see below

Table of Contents

Overview #

a photo of the physical art gallery hosted by METEOR
The My Famicase Exhibition

A Game By Its Cover is a game jam about turning fictional game cartridge label art into real games. Dominik Johann and I have been hosting it on itch.io every year for the past six years. Over the years hundreds of people participated, and hundreds of games have been made.

AGBIC has two main goals:

Our first goal is to get more attention to the works submitted to the My Famicase Exhibition, and to the event itself. It's a small annual art gallery hosted by METEOR in Tokyo, Japan. Famicase invites people to design their own, entirely fictional, Famicom-style cartridges, then displays them in a little gallery, on their website, and also features them in a little catalogue they sell.

AGBIC takes those fictional cartrige designs and invites game developers around the world to use them as inspiration for a small jam game. Essentially turning the fictional back into the real thing.

picture of the 'Far Above The Moon' famicase submission
For example: Daruma Studio's Far Above The Moon was the inspiration for…
a screenshot of the game Far Beneath The Stars
…Andrew Wang's Far Beneath The Stars

Against Crunch #

Our second but equally important goal is that we're doing our best to provide a relaxed atmosphere. Like it or not: Game jams, with their historically extremely limited and stress-inducing timeframe of 48 or 72 hours serve to reinforce and normalize harmful industry practices like crunch, for example. Crunch means skipping meals, pulling all-nighters, and ruining one's mental health all just to somehow, supposedly, achieve a better result. We feel strongly about not encouraging that, not even a little bit, so we're doing everything we can with AGBIC to run it as relaxed as possible.

Itch.io provides features for judging, scoring and voting on jam entires - but we very deliberately don't use them. We don't believe competition is a good, healthy long-term motivator.

We're also pretty relaxed about rules. Everything qualifies as a game in our book. Every submission is fine by us, as long as its somehow inspired by fictional game-related art.

And finally, we also keep the submission window open for weeks or sometimes even months, and we will always accept late submissions.

History #

agbic

TODO: Write this section. Meanwhile: our past jam pages:

Press Coverage #

AGBIC and some of the games submitted to the jam got covered by various outlets: