From a 2015 Game Jam to Wrong Dimension: The Story of There Is No Game

Before There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension came out on Steam and Switch, it was a small browser game made in a few days for a game jam. The version on this site is that one. Here is where it came from, what the jam asked for, and how it grew into a full game.

A jam with the theme "Deception"

In 2015 the makers of Construct 2, a drag-and-drop game engine for HTML5, ran a jam with a single-word theme: Deception. Most entries read it as a story theme — spies, traitors, liars. Pascal Cammisotto, working alone as Kamizoto, turned it on the player. His game deceives you from the first line: it claims there is no game at all, and spends its whole running time trying to talk you out of playing.

The credits are honest about the size of the team. Design, code, art, sound, music, "horrible voice acting" and coffee: Kamizoto. The voice that pleads with you is his own.

What the jam version does

The trick of the game is that its obstacles are its own parts. The title screen is the first level. The sound icon is a puzzle. A tiny brick-breaker appears inside the game that is not a game, and the narrator treats it like something dangerous. Letters fall out of the logo and come back as tools. The joke only works because the game is so short and so sure of itself: you are never more than a minute from the next thing he does not want you to do.

It is also a very small program: a Construct 2 export, a few hundred sound files for the voice lines in English and French, and pixel-art sprites for a goat, a key, a squirrel, a tree and a lot of broken letters. It runs in any modern browser and needs only a mouse.

From jam game to Wrong Dimension

The jam game found an audience on web portals, where people shared it for the same reason they still do: it is funny, and it surprises you. Cammisotto founded the studio Draw Me A Pixel and spent the following years turning the idea into a full game. There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension was released in 2020. It keeps the narrator, the broken title and the idea of a game fighting its player, and adds chapters that parody other genres, from point-and-click adventures to mobile games.

Wrong Dimension is a commercial game and is not available here. If you enjoy the jam version, it is the natural next step, and it is sold on the usual stores.

Why the jam version is still worth playing

A jam game has to make its point fast. This one does it in the first thirty seconds, with one sentence: please do not touch the title. Everything after that is a string of small jokes about what games are supposed to be — a crate that will not break, a goat that promises a hit, a narrator more afraid of his own game than you are.

It is short enough to finish before a class ends and strange enough that people remember it. Play There Is No Game, or read the hints guide if the narrator wins the argument.