These developers want you to steal The Great Gatsby

In January 2021, The Great Gatsby officially out of copyright.

The event was celebrated with a 30-day game jam on itch.io.

Organized by Jess Geyer and Alex Sprague from Wannabe Games, Gatsby Jam Run for 30 days. The result was an assortment of 9 tabletop and digital games, mostly made by people who hadn’t read The Great Gatsby, but were still willing and willing to talk about its themes and aesthetics.

Of course, the jam wasn’t exactly a celebration of Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless prose. It was a commentary on copyright law and the myriad ways you can remix and reinterpret a work once it’s free to use.

“I think that’s another way you’re just contributing to the canon, this big conversation that people are having with literature, movies and games themselves,” Geyer said. “It’s this big talk back and forth. And it’s kind of a conversation that copyright suffocates, you can’t have a conversation so clearly if you have to tiptoe around what you can write.

Watch the video to see the Gatsby Jam games and learn more about how copyright and patent law play a role in game development.

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