Double Fine opens its prototype fortnight to fans, who vote on and fund the games

Double Fine, the studio behind Psychonauts and Broken Age, ran an annual ritual called Amnesia Fortnight: production stopped, the company split into small teams, and each team had two weeks to make a playable game prototype. The name was the joke — the team forgets what it was working on, then remembers in a fortnight. The first two jams were private, and Tim Schafer chose the team leaders himself.

In 2012 Double Fine opened the ritual to the public for the first time. Twenty-three staff members pitched game ideas on video, and anyone who paid at least a dollar through Humble Bundle could vote on which pitches became two-week prototypes and then play the results. A film crew from 2 Player Productions documented each team, and buyers also received two historical prototypes — the early Costume Quest and Happy Song, which had inspired Once Upon a Monster.

The 2014 edition repeated the trick at larger scale: four prototypes were chosen by public vote, with Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward recruited to lead one of them, and the whole jam was again filmed and bundled. What had been a guarded internal exercise became a recurring public festival of unfinished work.

The idea worked because the prototypes had a proven track record: Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade and Once Upon a Monster were released games that grew out of the endeavor, and later jams kept feeding Hack 'n' Slash and Spacebase DF-9 into development.