Toronto Game Jam (TOJam) - Free 3-Day Game Making Event | Robert Segal

TO Jam (tojam.ca) turns 20 this year — 20 years of anything is remarkable. Toronto has always had incredible talent, something that became clear through meeting so many passionate people at the early IGDA Toronto Chapter meetups. I'm grateful for those who stayed until the end of every bar night and generously answered whatever questions I threw at them — Guillaume Provost , Trevor Fencott , Ryan MacLean among others. There was a shared passion to build games. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to make a game, you had to build nearly everything yourself. Unreal was prohibitively expensive, and Unity was either just getting started or not yet free — neither were the accessible tools they are today. That spirit was a big part of the inspiration behind the first iterations of TO Jam: make something — anything — in a weekend. It sounds easy. A weekend sounds and feels like a lot of time. It isn't. True for game jams and also actually making games. Myself, Jim McGinley , Emilie McGinley and Nelson Yu got together and tried a a “test” jam to see if it could be done. It worked well enough that we said this could work for real. Now hundreds, thousands(?) have also proven this. If you're participating this year, take a moment to thank the volunteers and organizers! A few kind words go a long way during what can be an incredibly stressful event. Nothing endures without the support of a community — people who simply get things done out of pure passion for the craft. Organization and support of TO Jam has always been volunteer based. I wanted to make a long list of everyone but it would quite honestly be immense and several pages long. A few immediate callouts from the early years when I was more involved. Tessa Segal, Alex Bethke, Paul Forest, Andrew Traviss, Jonathan Remedios, Jenny Glozman, PhD, RP, RMFT Arthur Marris Thank you to everyone who has volunteered their time over the years. Special thanks to JP Amore of George Brown College (and former co-student at TMU Comp Sci.) for always supporting the vision of the jam; Ron Smith of Innovation Toronto for hosting TO Jam 2 and 3; and Gorm Lai , founder of Nordic Game Jam, who showed up at ToJam 3 (or 4?) to engage in our ongoing friendly rivalry over who ran the biggest single-location game jam in the world. Here’s to 20 years of jammin’! #tojam #toronto #videogames #ontario #canada