Over 300 participants at the 20th MálagaJam Weekend this weekend

This weekend, Málaga will host the world's largest in-person video game marathon. The Digital Content Hub will welcome participants this Friday ... and Saturday for the MálagaJam Weekend, featuring over 300 participants.

The National Digital Content Hub at Tabacalera will host the event, now in its 20th edition, with participation from over 80 countries. Attendees will have 48 hours to create video games in a weekend of coexistence aimed at fostering game development in a safe environment under healthy practices, creating community, establishing connections, and promoting national talent alongside developers and entrepreneurs. This year, the event is collaborating for the first time with the Málaga Animal Protection Society by collecting food for the shelter.

Food collection for the Animal Protection for the first time

The video game marathon will begin on Friday, January 30 at 3:00 PM. At the start of the sessions, teams will be formed consisting of programmers, musicians, designers, creators, writers, and artists of any age or experience. Subsequently, the organization will announce the theme around which the games for this edition must be developed.

Symbolic Awards

The organization will symbolically award the best games in the categories of: Best Game, Best Sound Section, Best Game Design, Best Narrative, Best Visual Section, and Special Recognition from the organization.

One of the goals is to promote gender, racial, functional, and sexual orientation diversity and inclusion within the community and the video game industry. To this end, MálagaJam Weekend is collaborating with the associations Femdevs and La Madriguera to advise participants. Games with the best diverse representation will also be awarded.

Pre-event Lectures

As a prelude to the event, the Digital Hub will host 'Charlitas Deluxe' on Thursday, free-entry lectures until full capacity with the participation of renowned professionals from the sector belonging to leading national and international studios and companies. The profiles at the Hub include Juno, a well-known publisher from Devolver Digital, Emilio Coppola, founder of the Godot tool, and Ana Morales, artist at Ericsson. The schedule is as follows:

17:00 – Kuriblu (Ana Morales, artist at Ericsson) – The Third Castor Game: Video Games in Contemporary Art.

18:00 – Emi (Emilio Coppola, founder of the Godot tool)- Challenging Entropy

19:00 – Juno (Devolver Digital) – Screw the Box – Experimental Development or How to Pretend You Know What You're Doing.

The MálagaJam initiative, a non-profit association that fosters and promotes video game culture, is supported by the Málaga City Council, through the National Digital Content Hub and FYCMA; Telefónica Foundation through Campus 42, Devolver Digital, Unity, Deconstructeam, the Alan Turing Master's Program in Video Games, and Jump Over the Age; along with the collaboration of the LGTBIQ+ players' associations La Madriguera and the Femdevs Association, which promotes the interest, participation, and presence of women in the video game development culture, and Lex Ludi, a cultural association of board games and alternative leisure. MálagaJam has already accumulated more than 3,600 participants and more than 710 games created across the 19 editions held to date. Tickets are already sold out.