Mojang, the makers of Minecraft, invited over some friends this weekend to build video games from scratch and raise a ton of cash for charity. Mojang, Oxeye Game Studios and Wolfire Games have already raised more than $200,000. But don't forget, you can play the end product of their build-a-thon, when it ends in about 30 hours.
What kind of games will they make? Well, 100,000 fans determined that, by poll. That's why Mojang and Wolfire are building, wait for it, "a real-time strategy shoot 'em up, with a steampunk, ancient Egypt theme." They've christened that project Catacomb Snatch.
Update: Mojang's Markus "Notch" Persson has said he will "change my beard if mojam hits half a million dollars." That certainly seems reachable.
Oxeye Game Studios is working on "a dungeon crawler beat 'em up set in a post-apocalyptic World War II!" That one actually fits together in my mind, if you're thinking about looking for Nazi treasure in a bombed-out city. Who knows what Oxeye's doing with it exactly though—it's yet to be named.
These games will be bundled together and sold on a pay-what-you-want basis; all of the proceeds go to charity, and you may choose from four: The Child's Play Charity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Red Cross, and charity: water, a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations.
As of this writing more than $225,000 has been raised, and the top individual contributor to the cause has given more than $2,000, with another giving $1,900 and five others giving $1,000 or more.
And if watching games development is your thing, the Mojam page has a livestream of Catacomb Snatch being created. See it through the link below.