Baba Is You (2017 Jam Build) — A 48-Hour Origin Born from 'Not There'

Introduction

This is the story of a prototype born within the 48-hour constraint of the Nordic Game Jam, held at Docken in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 21 to 23 April 2017. That year drew 700 participants who submitted 144 games under the theme 'Not There.' Baba Is You, built alone by Finnish University of Helsinki student Arvi Teikari (known as Hempuli), won first place at that jam.

Most people know Baba Is You as the finished game released on Steam and Nintendo Switch on 13 March 2019. But what I wish to dig up here is the free jam build itself, released two years earlier. On Teikari's own itch.io page (hempuli.itch.io/baba-is-you), that original demo build remains downloadable to this day, an ancestor that genuinely survives outside of Steam.

Why doesn't the ice melt beside the lava? (illustration, AI-generated)

The Context of the Era

Nordic Game Jam began in Copenhagen in 2006 and grew into one of the largest game jams in the Nordic region. The 2017 venue was Docken. Participants complete a game within tens of hours under a given theme and are then judged. Teikari, who had previously made the Metroidvania-style Environmental Station Alpha (2015), attended the jam alone that year.

The tools he used were not a large studio's development pipeline. He combined Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion 2 with Lua scripting, aided by his friend Lukas Meller. Tools an individual could use as an extension of a hobby, together with itch.io as a free distribution platform: this indie production culture of the mid-2010s became the soil in which, under the extreme constraint of 48 hours, a single invention took root.

48 hours, theme: 'Not There' (illustration, AI-generated)

Mechanics

By Teikari's own account, the idea's starting point was the theme 'Not There' itself. While thinking about how 'Not' functions in logic, reversing some concept X by stating 'Not X,' the image came to him of a block of ice sitting beside lava yet not melting. The idea was that a single sentence, 'ICE IS NOT MELT,' could make that possible.

In a 2019 interview he named the turn-based block-pushing games he had been playing before the jam, Stephen's Sausage Roll, Snakebird, and Jelly no Puzzle, stating plainly that inspiration from these combined with the 'Not X' concept. He had initially planned for objects to carry default properties (ice would melt near lava, for instance) that could be disabled with 'Not,' but partway through development he decided it would be more interesting if objects had no default properties at all, and changed course. Letting all meaning arise solely from the word-rules placed on the board became the core decision behind the finished game.

The jam-build Baba was conceived not as the goat-like creature familiar from later years, but as a robot with antennae. Teikari has since revealed that when his friend Jason Boyer drew fan art reinterpreting Baba as a humanoid goat, he liked it enough to later revise the sprite in that direction. Even the look of the 48-hour prototype differed from the finished release.

Break the line of words, and the rule vanishes too (illustration, AI-generated)

Lineage to the Present

Winning the jam was only the beginning. Baba Is You was entered in the Independent Games Festival's student category in 2018, winning 'Excellence in Design' and 'Best Student Game' and being nominated for the festival's top honor, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Before the official release, in April 2018, a French outfit released a near-identical clone on the App Store under the same name; Teikari worked with Apple's French division to have it removed. It is a bitter piece of evidence that a free prototype had already drawn the industry's attention.

The finished game launched on Steam and Nintendo Switch on 13 March 2019, and that year won Best Design and the Innovation Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards, and Outstanding Achievement in Game Design at the D.I.C.E. Awards. Mobile versions arrived in June 2021, and the free level editor 'Baba Make Level' was added that November. Over the following years, a 48-hour jam entry grew into a genre-defining work carrying countless citations and awards.

The lineage stretches further still. Patrick Traynor, developer of 2022's Patrick's Parabox, named Baba Is You alongside Stephen's Sausage Roll and A Monster's Expedition in a Game Developer interview discussing his own grid-based puzzle design, citing the appeal these Sokoban-like puzzles hold for 'reasoning about the grid and the physicality of it.' I will not simplify this into a claim that 'Baba Is You directly created Patrick's Parabox.' But it is a matter of record, by testimony, that the idea one programmer tried at a 2017 jam venue, pushing words to rewrite rules, did travel beyond those 48 hours and into other designers' hands.

From a 2017 jam to Steam in 2019 (illustration, AI-generated)

References

Sources referenced in this article:

・Wikipedia: Baba Is You

・Wikipedia: Nordic Game Jam

・Independent Games Festival: Baba is You | Entry 2018 (archived)

・The Indie Game Website: Baba Is You Developer Arvi Teikari Talks Indie Innovation, Influences and Puzzle Design (2019)

・GDC Vault: Reading the Rules of ‘Baba Is You’ (Arvi Teikari, GDC 2020)

・Gamasutra: Road to the IGF: Hempuli Oy’s Baba Is You (archived)

・Gamasutra: IGF Award-winning Baba Is You cloned before it was even released (archived)

・Game Developer: Designing the mind-bending puzzles in Patrick’s Parabox

・itch.io: Baba Is You (2017 jam-version demo, hempuli)

Closing

In April 2017, an idea written within 48 hours at a Copenhagen venue was, at that point, still a rough prototype wearing the form of a robot. Yet the core of the idea, redefining a concept using nothing but words placed on the board, was already complete there. The commercial success of 2019, the many awards, and the influence on other designers: the seeds of all of it were sown in just two and a half days at a jam venue offering no prize money.

My interest as a historian lies in the order of these facts. The free itch.io jam build has not disappeared; it remains there today. Looking only at the finished product that sits on Steam risks mistaking where this invention was actually born. The origin of the play of pushing words to rewrite rules lay inside a prototype shared for free, before it was ever made into a product. That is what I wish to set down here.

Still sitting there, just outside the door (illustration, AI-generated)