PIXELJAM COMPLETE

This is it.

Everything we have ever made, or even *considered* making. It's all here. Every game, every soundtrack, every prototype or alpha, plus a plethora of concept art, sketches, GIFs, wallpapers, etc...  You get the idea.  It's an embarrassment of pixel riches!

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- 20+ Games & Soundtracks (Including Dino Run DX, Cheap Golf, Last Horizon, Potatoman Seeks the Troof, Glorkian Warrior, Wrath of Pegasus & more) - Prototypes, Alphas, Gifs, Wallpapers, Comics & Music - Total Size: 8.5 Gigs - Total Number Of Files: About 1800 (organized in over 40 zip archives)

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This bundle is sold on a sliding scale. We feel it's worth $30 or more, but you can go as low as $15 if you already own some (or all) of our games, or just don't have the means to pay more.  If you can pay more though, please do! ༼つ◕_◕ ༽つ -- We gladly accept the Universe's abundance --

All games are DRM-Free. Steam keys are not included by default but are available upon request (our email is [email protected]).

The gifs, assets and designs included in the bundle are for personal use only, or sharing on social media.  Please don't use them in commercial game projects!   :)

Some of the money raised from this bundle goes directly to the development of Dino Run 2! More details at pixeljam.com/dinorun.

Now let's dive into the history of all this stuff!  Get comfy...

THE EARLY YEARS

(2005-2009)

Note: everything you see in this description is downloadable and/or playable, once you purchase the bundle.

Pixeljam started in a Chicago apartment in 2005. Rich and I (Miles) were roommates, wondering what to do with our lives.  We were restless and creative... we wanted to quit our day jobs and start a business together!  Hmm.... what would it be?  Why not video games! And so our journey began.

Rich loved pixel art, and I was good at Flash.  And we both loved Adventure for Atari 2600, so, why not rip it off:

[ Play this in Pixeljam_Prototypes_Alphas.zip ]

Once we had this little beauty under our belt, it made total sense to throw caution to the wind and spend the next 6 months of our lives going all in on our dream game. What could possibly go wrong?

GAME 01

[ Play this in Pixeljam_Prototypes_Alphas.zip ]

Our very first game! It was kind of like Adventure meets Robotron, with a more  playful vibe.  We got about 10% done and realized OH NO THIS IS GOING TO TAKE FOREVER. So we had to stop.  Here is exactly how far we got:

Alot of great characters were pulled from Game 01 that would appear in other games we would never complete. BUT, we did manage to complete a game with THESE guys:

And it's called

GAMMA BROS 

We love the Gamma Bros, and we were really stoked to finally finish a game.  We made it free with a well-hidden donate button, because it would just be in poor taste to actually make any money from it. Later on we uploaded the game to Newgrounds and Kongregate, and it was popular!  Wow!

RATMAZE

Okay, Gamma Bros wasn't our first completed game. Ratmaze was.  It used the Game 01 engine and took us about 2 weeks.  We needed to take a break from Gamma Bros and just get something out there. We still think Ratmaze is great, and it even had 2 sequels!

After Gamma Bros, we spent some time prototyping various games, none of which ever saw the light of day.  They were:

OUTRAGEOUS ROBOT BATTLE

Like Robotron again (can you tell we love that game?) but with 1v1 local multiplayer.  It had great music by Mark DeNardo, which of course you can listen to if you *ahem* buy the bundle.

[ Play this in Pixeljam_Prototypes_Alphas.zip ]

MOONJUMPER

A very ambitious and chill space exploration adventure.  We got as far as a moon rover taking jumps on craters and called it quits.

BEE GAME

You're a bee!  You fly around and pollinate flowers! You expand your hive and guard it from invaders! You can explore an anthill!  We never completed it!  Not even close!

[ Play this in Pixeljam_Prototypes_Alphas.zip ]

And then after all these this we started and actually completed something:

DINO RUN

Our most well-known game.  Rich had the idea for this during a road trip he was taking at the time:

This game was a real pain in the ass to make.  I almost had a few nervous breakdowns. I learned a lot of new programming techniques and rolled my own physics engine from nothing... and then made it realtime multiplayer.  Can you *feel* all my grey hairs?

It was worth it.

Dino Run is what put us on the map... it led to a LOT of other opportunities, so let's explore them...

ADULT SWIM DAYS

(2009 - 2013) 

Adult Swim was, and continues to be, awesome people. They even recently gave us permission to give away all the games we made for them for free! So even though we are putting them in this bundle (for posterity), we are giving them away for free, one per day, ON THE PAGE. Anyway, Adult Swim contacted us shortly after Dino Run came out and asked if we'd like to make a game for them, for REAL MONEY. We said YES! And our first game was...

PIZZA CITY

Our most ambitious game for Adult Swim, kind of like GTA on an Atari 2600. Deliver pizzas, dodge traffic and cops, run over clowns and interact with a city full of colorful characters.

[ All Adult Swim Games can be found in Pixeljam_Web_Games_OST_Extras.zip ]

We all liked how Pizza City turned out, so this led to more games.  I'll go through them all in the order they were made, and then go back in time a bit to talk about the side-projects we were working on in tandem.

SAUSAGE FACTORY

A rhythm game about beating smashing your meat to the beat in order to make lovely sausages.

MOUNTAIN MANIAC

Witness an angry mountain man create and control huge boulders with the power of sheer rage in order to destroy a sleepy little town.

CREAMWOLF

A collaboration with Messhof, who is probably best know for his game Niddhog. You're the local ice cream man!  You're also a werewolf, and you uh... lure kids to your hideout and eat them.  Geez, what the hell were we thinking?

MOUNTAIN MANIAC XMAS

A sequel with a winter theme. You even get to fight Santa Claus! I am particularly proud of the soundtrack to this one... a collection of minor key Christmas classics.

HIPSTER KICKBALL

Hipsters vs Hippies... the classic showdown.  This one was a lot of fun to make, and represented our first attempt at the 16-bit style.

CORPORATE CLIMBER

This is probably our favorite Adult Swim game.  Make your way up the corporate ladder at all costs!  Full of office humor (not that we have ever worked in an office) and secrets galore.

CAPTAIN COMMANDER

Another one of our favorites, this is a classic sci-fi run n' gunner in an Atari style.  

RETRO UNICORN ATTACK

Our final game for Adult Swim was a demake of the incredibly popular Robot Unicorn Attack.  My favorite part of this project was getting to help make a Commodore 64 style cover of Erasure's "Always".

COOKIE PARTY 2

Before we did any games for Adult Swim, we actually made one for Comedy Central for the Sarah Silverman Program!  The game is really weird, but we got paid to make a pixel version of Sarah, which was awesome:

SIDE HUSTLIN'

Making games for Adult Swim took most of our time, but also allowed us to do a little exploration on what our next big game would be.  Near the beginning of our Adult Swim journey, Mark met cartoonist James Kochalka at a music show in New York City.  They got to talking and it turned out that James had always wanted to make a game.  We later decided that we would use this crazy new site called "Kickstarter" to fund it. We didn't really think that internet strangers would give us 10K to make something, but what do you know... they actually did. And...  4 or 5 years later we finally delivered on it, after building the game from the ground-up *three* times (UGH).

GLORKIAN WARRIOR

The first version of the game was ambitious to say the least.  That *might* have something to do with why it never got completed:

So we decided to cut back our vision and focus on a mini-version of the game, which was apparently still too big...

Somehow... we managed to finally make something we could release, and it was also our first iOS game as well.  The Trials of Glork was here!

RATMAZE 2

Somewhere around this time we also managed to squeeze out a sequel to Ratmaze, which was a lot of fun and minimal stress. Good ol' Ratmaze...

POTATOMAN SEEKS THE TROOF

Toward the end of our time making games for Adult Swim, we were pretty restless.  We *really* wanted to transition back into making our own games, but the security of doing games-for-hire made it difficult to take any big risks.  I spent a few weeks working on a prototype for Potatoman without even showing it to anyone else, and then finally got Rich involved when it was time to complete the graphics.  The whole project came together pretty fast, and we managed to release it right before the world was supposed to end on December 21st, 2012.  Remember when that didn't happen? Anyway, Potatoman is still something I'm really proud of, and we even got you-know-who to play it...

SNOWBALL!

This started as a little flash game made for Miniclip, but we liked it so much we decided to bring it to Steam and Mobile.  A winter pinball playground full of awesome pixel art by Graham Lackey.

PIXELJAMS VOLUME 1

I've always wanted to run a music label, but it sounds even more horrifying that running a game company.  We did get to scratch this itch a little bit with our first compilation called Pixeljams...  it's not chiptunes or game music, it's just music made by the people that make music for Pixeljam, and some of our close friends and favorite artists.

PLANETERI

In addition to music we've always been a big fan of music visualization.  This little app was inspired by the pixel animations Rich made before Pixeljam was even a thing:

It's a collection of interactive abstract visualizations, set to ambient music.

BITKU

This fun little app lets you make art or comics out of the multitude of low-res one-color characters that Rich has been cooking up over the years:

DINO RUN XE

Before the big Dino Run DX campaign, we attempted to remake Dino Run with more modern physics and gameplay, and the prototype included in the bundle shows how far we got.  Pretty neat!  Think of it as Dino Run 1.5...

GROWING UP

(2013-2019)

I suppose it's a good sign that there are less playable-but-unfinished games in the last 6 years, which is what this section covers. We probably figured out how to kill a project *before* we spent too much time on it.  Now don't get us wrong, we have dozens of games that we'd love to make that only exist on paper or in concept art, (and of course you get to see them if you buy the bundle), but we managed to stay on course a bit more during this time, and we'd like to think we're always getting better at it.

LAST HORIZON

During the final days of the mighty flash portal, a wonderful guy named Bryce who ran a site called Dojo.com hired us to make some games for him.  We started with about a dozen ideas and got down to 2 - Planet Hopper and Pegasus. 

We worked on them in tandem for about a year.  Planet Hopper really started to show promise, so we found a better name for it (Last Horizon) and proceeded with a mobile port as well as a Steam version.

WRATH OF PEGASUS

Pegasus on the other hand, had a more troubled development.  We could never really figure out exactly what kind of game it was...  It looked great, and played well enough, but by the time we finished it the flash game market had bottomed out and it didn't seem big enough to release on Steam or Mobile.  So, it just stayed on our hard drives, 99% complete, waiting for its big moment... AND HERE IT IS!

PIXELJAMS VOLUME 2

Our second compilation of non-game music!  We even have an incredible music video in this one by Rory Scott, for track by Datassette called "A Doomed Vessel":

CHEAP GOLF

This game began as a successful 1-week kickstarter for a goofy little mini golf game and slowly evolved into a multi-disciplinary art project starring a hyper-evolved AI bot named SUSAN. What can we say, it's hard to keep our imagination under control, for better or worse...

Cheap Golf has by far the best bonus goodies of any of our games in the bundle, including videos of SUSAN playing Atari 2600 games, 2 "music" albums, wallpapers, humor and plenty of artwork.

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In case this enormous wall of text has made you forget why you were reading it in the first place, everything we just talked about here and more is in the bundle. It really is our life's work, and we hope you enjoy it :)

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ADDENDUM

It's more like Pixeljam 99% complete, but that doesn't sound good.  We had to leave a few things out for either legal / permission reasons, or because we are actively working on bringing the project to release and are not ready to show it yet :)

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UPDATE #1

We just added NovaDrift_2014 to the bundle!  This contains Windows and Mac playable prototypes, design docs and some other goodies from 2014, for a game we published this year: https://store.steampowered.com/app/858210/Nova_Drift/