How Mod Jam was launched

Brick Lane, we did it!

Mod Jam #01 - DADA DOOM, the first ever public mod jam, took place at the Newspeak House in London a month ago on Saturday the 26th of April 2025.

A motley crew of talented game designers, activists and early modding flâneurs dedicated their Saturday to modding Doom under the sign of Dada.

Mod? We repurposed, remixed, expanded, hijacked and détourned the 1993 classic first-person shooter as a way to reclaim agency, open possibilities within its system and change a doomed world using its own rules and constraints.

Jam? Where the magic of exploration, expression and serendipity can happen. We gathered in person and spat ideas from absurd level design to unfeasible game mechanics and non-starter nonsensical storylines onto a whiteboard. A mental patchwork that ended up looking like the hallucinations of a tormented alien intelligence for a handful of frenzied cult followers to mod into existence.

DADA DOOM? Dada’s subversive, irreverent and poetic energy was (we hoped!) the perfect fit for Doom’s open-source design, which has allowed generations of modders to turn its first-person shooter tropes inside out. We wanted to create an interesting chemical reaction with DADA DOOM... and it worked!

When you throw in spicy design visions into the hard but fair constraints of a tried and tested recipe, you get a tasty culinary creation unlike anything you’ve sampled before.

A thousand mod journey begins where one stands. Join us for future mod jams as we change the rules of the game one mod at a time. Until then, may peace be upon you and look out for manifestos.

Thank you to original Doom programmer John Carmack, participants Adam Hodgson, Ajmal "Alex" Rizni, Andrew Knight, Charles Cai, Colin Kiama, Edward Saperia, Fynn Levy, Jack Crawley, Jo Summers, Matthew Klingensmith, Victor Fleurot, Vidhi Desai, Til Nomi, Casimir Wanot and Lorraine "Rainey" David.

And thank you to those who joined the Mod Jam Genesis Edition at Newspeak House in August 2024 - you helped us refine the prototype into a viable jam format that we can expand, replicate and tweak.

Everyone can download and play DADA DOOM at home.* 



* contains GDPR forms hellscape, pop-up button monsters, Apple terms & conditions purgatory corridor, credit room hallucination, game that never starts and Doomguy's Tower of Babel Sysiphean loop