TOJam or Toronto Game Jam is an annual game development event held at George Brown College in Toronto, Canada each spring, usually the first weekend in May. The event is named for the common abbreviation for Toronto ("T.O."), and the term for an impromptu performance ("jam"), borrowed from jazz. The name of the event is knowingly evocative of "toe jam." The first TOJam event was held in May 2006. [1] Among the organizers/co-founders were Emilie McGinley, Jim McGinley, Rob Segal and Nelson Yu. [2] [3] [4]
TOJam is a live event that takes place over the course of a single weekend from Friday to Sunday, although some events have offered developers earlier access starting Thursday. [5] Participants are called "jammers" and come from a variety of backgrounds, including hobbyists, students, and professionals. They often participate at the event with their own equipment and supplies. [6] Most attendees are adults, although some exceptions have been made for teenagers. [7] Jammers enlist either solo or in teams. Some enlist as graphics or sound "floaters," lending their skills to a number of different teams, who sign up for their services on a waiting list. While the majority of participants attend the event in person, recent jams have accommodated virtual jammers, due to space limitations and geographical distance. Attendees are not limited to those from Toronto and have included Americans and Finnish participants. [7]
Unlike other development events, TOJam is not a competition, but rather a period where game developers can focus their attention on a single project, with the goal of producing a finished, playable game by the end of the weekend. From the official kick-off Friday evening, jammers have 48 hours to complete their games before displaying them in an informal Sunday night showcase at the event's close.
A follow-up event, the TOJam Arcade, is scheduled a month or more after the main TOJam event. [8] Unlike the Sunday night showcase that is mainly intended for the jammers themselves, this event is open to the public. Scheduling allows jammers to fine-tune their games before presenting them to consumers, rather than creators, and it's usually held at a bar or pub in downtown Toronto. [9]
At each Arcade event, attendees vote for their favorite games, which are awarded Gold, Silver, and Puce standards. These "winning" games receive priority placement on the TOJam website, even though the goal of the event is to facilitate completed games and to encourage unity across the Toronto game development community.
Each year, TOJammers are strongly encouraged to include a number of elements into their games. These elements have included:
When the Toronto Game Jam began, Toronto was not a recognized city for game development, as it was overshadowed by Vancouver and Montreal, where major studios like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft had settled. The event was first suggested by Nelson Yu, a developer-turned-writer, in the IGDA community boards as a way to get more local game development, in an attempt to retain talent. The first TOJam occurred in 2006. [7]
Event | Date | Theme | Attendance (Physical/Virtual) | Completed Games | Valiant Attempts | Gold | Silver | Puce |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
TOJam #1 | May 5–7, 2006 | N/A | 35 | 10 | 7 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
TOJam #2 | May 4–6, 2007 | N/A | 62 | 26 | 2 | XIQ | Benny Hinn's Bible Blast for Cash | Quiver [10] |
TOJam #3 | May 9–11, 2008 | Cheese | 125 | 34 | 1 | a game about bouncing | debugger | Seas of Cheese [11] |
TOJam #4 | May 1–3, 2009 | Scale | 87/5 | 37 | 1 | Category 5 | Flock U | Cheese-ohol 2 Rosham Blaster [12] |
TOJam #5 | April 23, 2010 | Missing | 180/25 | 64 | (unreported) | (unannounced) | (unannounced) | (unannounced) [13] |
TOJam Sixy Times (#6) | May 13–15, 2011 | What just happened? | 260+ | 57 | 10 | TBD | TBD | TBD [14] |
TOJam: The Sevening (#7) | May 11–13, 2012 | The world's NOT ending | 400+ | (unannounced) | (unannounced) | N/A | N/A | N/A [15] |
TOJam: Haters Gonna Eight' (#8) | May 3–5, 2013 | Uncooperative | 450+ | (unannounced) | (unannounced) | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Party like it's 19TOJam9 (#9) | April 25–27, 2014 | After YOU! | 450+ | Submitted Games | (unannounced) | N/A | N/A | N/A |
TOJam: Tentacular (#10) | May 1–3, 2015 | It's All Come to This | 450+ | Submitted Games | (unannounced) | N/A | N/A | N/A |
TOJam: Don't Stop Beleven (#11) | May 6–8, 2016 | There Will Be Consequences | 460+ | Submitted Games | (unannounced) | N/A | N/A | N/A |
TOJam: What Twelves Below (#12) | May 5–7, 2017 | Prepare for Disappointment | 450+ | Submitted Games | (unannounced) | N/A | N/A | N/A |
TOJam: Flirteen with Danger (#13) | May 4–8, 2018 | Winning is for Losers | 625+ | Submitted Games | (unannounced) | N/A | N/A | N/A |
TOJam: Hindsight is 2020 (#14?) | May 8–10, 2020 | Together But Apart | N/A (will be virtual) | N/A | (unannounced) | N/A | N/A | N/A |
TOJam carries on a good-natured rivalry with the Nordic Game Jam, with which it competes for attendance and output.[ citation needed ] This rivalry has not been officially acknowledged by the organizers of the Nordic Game Jam.
Yu Suzuki is a Japanese game designer, producer, programmer, and engineer, who headed Sega's AM2 team for 18 years. Considered one of the first auteurs of video games, he has been responsible for a number of Sega's arcade hits, including three-dimensional sprite-scaling games that used "taikan" motion simulator arcade cabinets, such as Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner, and pioneering polygonal 3D games such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, which are some of the games besides others from rival companies during that era credited with popularizing 3D graphics in video games; as well as the critically acclaimed Shenmue series. As a hardware engineer, he led the development of various arcade system boards, including the Sega Space Harrier, Model 1, Model 2 and Model 3, and was involved in the technical development of the Dreamcast console and its corresponding NAOMI arcade hardware.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.
The Indie Game Jam (IGJ) was an effort to rapidly prototype video game designs and inject new ideas into the game industry. Started in 2002 by a group of game designer-programmers, the event featured a shared game engine technology and worked on by other designer-programmers for a single long weekend. The games resulting from that weekend were then published, open-source, on the IGJ web page.
A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. They are often run using agile software development practices, such as sprint-like design wherein computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on engineering projects, such as software engineering.
The Labour Day Classic is a week of the Canadian Football League (CFL) schedule played over the Labour Day weekend. Labour Day weekend, roughly 12 or 13 weeks into the CFL season, is known for its matchups that do not change from year to year, unlike other "rivalry" weeks of the CFL schedule. Labour Day weekend is also one of typically two weeks in the CFL schedule that the league plays on a Monday. Multinational Balkrishna Industries' OK Tire brand is the presenting sponsor of the event as of 2022.
Fan Expo Canada is an annual speculative fiction fan convention held in Toronto, Ontario. It was founded as the Canadian National Comic Book Expo in 1995 by Hobby Star Marketing Inc. It includes distinctly branded sections, including GX and SFX, and formerly CNAnime. It is a four-day event typically held the weekend before Labour Day during the summer at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC).
PAX is a series of gaming culture festivals involving tabletop, arcade, and video gaming. PAX is held annually in Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, and Melbourne. Previously, it was also held in San Antonio.
MAGFest is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to make the world a better place through video game art, music, and culture. They hold multiple events throughout the year, with their flagship event being an annual festival held in the Washington metropolitan area the National Harbor. The events feature concerts by chiptune artists and video game cover bands, educational panels and activities, free-to-play arcade cabinets, a bring your own computer (BYOC) LAN party, community jam spaces, and charity speedruns & auctions.
The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is an annual distributed game jam. Inspired by the Nordic Game Jam, and created by Susan Gold, Ian Schreiber, Gorm Lai and Foaad Khosmood, originally developed under the International Game Developers Association Education SIG to bring together the elements of creativity, collaboration and experimentation. At each site, participants gather to develop ideas, form small groups, create new, creative, innovative games, and present them to their peers and the global community, all in a limited time span. As of 2013, GGJ is managed by Global Game Jam Incorporated. Current and past board directors include the founders Elonka Dunin, Lindsay Grace and Zuraida Buter. 2022 staff members are Executive Director Tim Cullings, Director of Operations Charly Harbord, and Senior Director of Communications Tarja Porkka-Kontturi
This is a list of development studios owned by Sega, a Japanese video game developer and publisher based in Tokyo, Japan. Accompanied with the list is their history of game development. Also included are the companies that Sega has acquired over the years. For a full list of games developed and published by Sega, see List of Sega video games, List of Sega mobile games and List of Sega arcade games.
The Hand Eye Society is a not-for-profit coalition of projects and people in support of Toronto's video game communities.
In New Zealand, 67% of the population plays video games, 46% of video game players are female and the average age of a video game player is 34. New Zealanders spend an average of 88 minutes a day playing video games.
A game jam is an event where participants try to make a video game from scratch. Depending on the format, participants might work independently, or in teams. The event duration usually ranges from 24 to 72 hours. Participants are generally programmers, game designers, artists, writers, and others in game development-related fields. While many game jams are run purely as a game-making exercise, some game jams are contests that offer prizes.
Idle Thumbs is a video game culture website and podcast network founded in 2004.
Nordic Game Jam is an annual game jam that takes place in Copenhagen, created in 2006 by Gorm Lai and the Danish chapter of the International Game Developers Association in collaboration with Jesper Juul and Henriette Moos. It is one of the biggest videogame-related events in Denmark and one of the largest game jams in the world, with 900 participants as of 2016. Participants are given a theme or series of restrictions at the beginning of the event and are then given around 40 hours to make a game around those. In 2009 it served as the flagship game jam and inspiration for Global Game Jam.
Dark Room Sex Game is a rhythm-oriented party video game released on February 2008 for Windows and MacOS. It was designed and developed by a team of seven students of various nationalities. Subtitled "Can I touch your Wiimote?", it is presented as a sex game without graphics. The game runs on a fully black screen, and the gameplay is based solely on sound information and haptics. A player needs to find a rhythm with their partner, and gradually accelerate to a target frequency, representing the orgasm. The game is playable with a keyboard or the Wiimote, and supports up to four players.
I Get This Call Every Day is a 2012 point-and-click video game developed and published by Toronto-based developer David S Gallant. It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X on December 21, 2012. It focuses on a call received by an employee of a customer service call centre; the player must navigate through the call without irritating the caller or breaking confidentiality laws. Gallant was fired from his job at a call centre as a direct result of publishing the game.
Apple Arcade is a video game subscription service offered by Apple. It is available through a dedicated tab of the App Store on devices running iOS 13, VisionOS, tvOS 13, iPadOS 13, and macOS Catalina or later. The service launched on September 19, 2019.