The Humble Bundle Mojam has raised over $450,000 for charity in a single weekend.
Minecraft studio Mojang, along with fellow indie outfits Wolfire Games and Oxeye Game Studio, teamed up with the good folks at Humble Bundle for a 60-hour “game jam” this past weekend, an iron-man development session for a good cause – four of them, actually. Gamers were invited to donate to charity and then vote on their game genre of choice, after which the devs would spend 60 hours creating games based on a blend of the most and least-popular genres, livestreaming the whole thing.
When all was said and done, Mojang ended up with something called Catacomb Snatch, “a real-time strategy shoot ’em up with a steampunk, ancient Egypt theme” – remember, this was a user-voted thing – while Wolfire had The Broadside Express, a game of the same “genre” as Mojang’s. Oxeye did something a little different, opting for the second-most-popular (and least popular) choices, resulting in Fists of Resistance, “a dungeon crawler beat ’em up set in a post-apocalyptic World War 2.”
The resulting games aren’t perfect, if the reaction over at indiegames.com is anything to go by – although I’m not sure how shocked we should be that something thrown together over a weekend crash-course is buggy and incomplete – but the event was a huge success nonetheless. Unlike “normal” Humble Bundles, 100 percent of donations to the Humble Bundle Mojam went to charity, adding up to $458,229 for Child’s Play, the EFF, charity: water, and the American Red Cross, a tidy sum by any measure. Congratulations to everyone at the Humble Bundle, Mojang, Wolfire and Oxeye for a job well done!
