Before we start with all the explanations of why, who, what and where, we would like to thank our friends who helped build this Kickstarter. Nomi for video editing, design and animation. DOM for t-shirt design and for being a singing band member. Silkersoft for music and band production. Michael Liebe, Luke Crane and Anya Combs for campaign consulting. Ben Myres for proof reading. Matthias Löwe for feedback. Robin Baumgarten, Gregory Kogos and Guillermo Federico Heinze for their art.
A huge thank you to every member of the many A MAZE. teams from 2008 until now.
A MAZE. is an inclusive, forward thinking place where the present is lived and the future is prepared. A future where you play and interact with art and people on a meaningful and respectful level. We would really love to continue our work inspiring the games culture around the world.
A MAZE. mixes all amazing and positive ingredients together: flame throwers, masterclasses, delighting talks, hands-on workshops, #hypertalks, dream tents, live concerts, DJ sets, performances, human craziness, playful intelligence, beautiful minds, arthouse games, immersive art, playful media, and interactive installations.
A MAZE. / Berlin is also since 2011 the international games and playful media festival and art experience of the #gamesweekberlin .
Explore the A MAZE. / Berlin programme and award nominees (2018 and 2019)
We recorded most of the amazing talks by all our guest artists from 2012-2018 in Berlin and in Johannesburg. Very rare and inspiring talks on our A MAZE. YouTube channel.
Also a big shout out to our worldwide community, our partners, and the funders we’ve worked with to build A MAZE. into what it means to all of us now. Since 2008 we’ve all done a great job shaping the game culture and industry to be better. Without festivals like A MAZE., there wouldn’t be a safe and inclusive space distinct from products, big game conventions, and overpriced conferences. Additionally, much of the artful and thought-provoking interactive, immersive, and playful content/stories wouldn’t find the recognition of an audience. It is necessary to make this content visible and discoverable. There are many players out there who seek more than entertainment. Players want to be challenged and inspired. A MAZE. is a home for those works, and those players.
Every year, getting the festival budget together is always the trickiest part. Especially if you don’t want to sell out and desire to retain your uniqueness. We cannot take every sponsor!
Our main focus isn’t on business. Our core is art, experimentation, hot shit, and inspiration. A MAZE. is an experience. A full body-mind experience. We don’t want to sell out! We also don’t want to raise the ticket prices for participants. 70€ for students, regular 90€ (early bird), and 130€ (regular) are totally fair for the 3.5 days programme we’re preparing.
This year, A MAZE. asked for additional funding with the goal of more long term planning security, team development, and structure for A MAZE. and its Berlin festival.
We’re not only talking about the festival production! We want to focus on creating a “steady team” who works together in building a prosperous future for the festivals and projects we do! There isn’t, at the moment, any planning security and no stability. This could burn A MAZE. if there is any change coming. This kind of longer term funding would also enable us to commission works, and curate the programme and the exhibition with external curators based on themes. Well, to make it short, our applications weren’t chosen by the juries, and that’s why we are here now. It’s important for us to keep the quality of the festival experience high, the programme fresh, and the exhibition diverse. To do that, we need a motivated and fairly compensated team.
With the success of this campaign we will continue, highly motivated, to bring A MAZE. to the next level and move forward. The next level for us means structure and team development that guarantees a sustainable foundation of A MAZE. as a platform. This includes A MAZE. / Berlin, the production of A MAZE. / Nairobi, and the creation of an arthouse games network that will support authors and creators around the globe.
If we exceed the 50K, here are our plans. Upon overtaking the goal of 60K we want to bring back one issue of the A MAZE. Magazine. At the 85K we will bring into motion a book on arthouse/auteur games and the connected history of A MAZE. If we reach the stars and go beyond 150K, some money could cover the first production steps of A MAZE. / Nairobi in 2020.
All supporters will be list on the supporter website. We will also make a campaign banner for 2020 which shows every supporter at all our events we do.
YEAH! Your contribution means a lot us! You will receive all updates of this campaign and can decide later if you like to upgrade to a higher pledge.
The legendary ritual is a go! Thorsten S. Wiedemann, the founder and artistic director of A MAZE.(aka DJ Storno), closes the festival every year with his 180% full energy club mix. The recording of his set is now for your party (mp3 and soundcloud)!
Every year A MAZE. Festival books an eclectic party programme for every night of the festival that includes cool concerts, dj sets and live performances. Shows are a mix of musicians from the games community and local performers from Berlin. We’ll put together some highlights of this party programme into one digital album for you.
From us you will receive the first ever A MAZE. Arthouse Game Bundle. It’s a surprise bundle with 5+ PC games selected.
The t-shirts/ hoodies designed by DOM only for the #AmazeNotDead campaign. These tees/ hoodies are a kickstarter exclusive and limited to 139 units. Best quality.
These festival tickets are unique as our festival ticket shop isn’t open yet. Get one of the special priced supporter tickets and you will help us a lot.
RotoRing is an award winning alt.ctrl game by Gregory Kogos. It is a circular puzzle-platformer. Its „display“ is made out of 2 orbits of LED lights. The game uses a custom controller as input: with the dial, the player controls movement of the single brightest light, and with the button the light jumps from one orbit to another. The goal is to get to the empty spot while avoiding the red lights on every level.
Since 2019, A MAZE. has worked with the light artist Guillermo Federico Heinze, who designed, in collaboration with the 3D artist Moshe Linke, our new A MAZE. Award. We have reserved three of the holograms for placement on your wall. Very unique!
RotoRing is an award winning alt.ctrl game by Gregory Kogos. It is a circular puzzle-platformer. Its „display“ is made out of 2 orbits of LED lights. The game uses custom controller as an input: with the dial player controls movement of the single brightest light and with the button the light jumps from one orbit to another. The goal is to get to the empty spot while avoiding the red lights on every level. These big screen versions are 46×46 cm. BIG!
One of the most famous, and A MAZE. Award 2015 winning, alt.ctrl games by Robin Baumgarten. Line Wobbler is a one-dimensional dungeon crawler game with a unique wobble controller made out of a door-stopper spring and a several meter long ultrabright LED strip display. The entire game runs on an arduino, including sound, particle effects and 60+fps.
If you’re running a company and want to support A MAZE. , we have the perfect Xmas present for you. Get yourself and your team members A MAZE. / Berlin 2020 festival passes. This bundle contains 10 full passes. Each pass includes one piece of merch to pick up at the door.
Wobble Garden by Robin Baumgarden is an experimental hardware platform that invites you to explore a mysterious LED spring garden by touching and wobbling an arrangement of sensing springs. A very unique experience for your space. This is the first Wobble Garden Robin is giving away publicly. Usually only playable at festivals and exhibitions.
You are wild about the idea of having a one-night game party à la A MAZE. at your city/ town/ village/ island/ forest/ beach/ festival/ birthday/ wedding. We are ready to help set up an amazing show with games, immersive art, playful media, and music (DJ Storno is pre booked). Bring the A MAZE. vibe to your neighborhood and your crowd! We, you , and your audience will never forget this unique moment. This pledge doesn’t include any travel costs, rental costs, accommodation costs and artist fees. Dates and content will get discussed together remotely. Then party on site!.
With this really cool pledge you have the special force to give a 7min speech at the A MAZE. Awards 2020.
A really unique talk spot given side-by-side with Thorsten S. Wiedemann, artistic director of A MAZE.. In 7 minutes present your love, respect, and ground breaking opinions to our international game and playful media community.
This is super important: please be aware that all rewards DO NOT INCLUDE SHIPPING COSTS, which will be added when the campaign has ended.
A MAZE. was established in 2008 in Berlin and is celebrating, for the 10th year, the convergence of games, art, and other dimensions. A MAZE. also explores alternative movements in games, culture, and digital art around the world. With our unique, open minded, and lowbrow festival vibe, some have called it the “Burning Man of Game Festivals”. The 9th edition of A MAZE. / Berlin in 2020 will be a real experience for different thinking creatives who are coming to share, work, network, and party a lot.
A MAZE creates #PositiveChaos that mirrors the digital world, and the narratives we are living in, to create answers made of meaningful and artistic content in games and VR creation. We achieve this with our forward-thinking direction of curating an art exhibition of contemporary games and experimental playful media works, delightful talks and workshops, presenting the international A MAZE. Awards in 7 categories, and mixing mind bending performances from different music scenes.
Since 2012 we have built and expanded our events and collaborations into an international artgames community of passionate punks of the digital age. A community of people who believe not only in monetary success, but idealistic and artistic expression. For example, A MAZE. / Johannesburg (2012-2017) was the annual Sub-Saharan Africa hotspot supporting local game developers, African digital artists, communities, and institutions. A MAZE. / Johannesburg enabled them to build their own connections, get inspired, gain international visibility, and build a two way bridge between European and African A MAZE. communities.
Some of our works (2008-now) :
Lorenzo Pilia (2013-now) for programme in Berlin , Matthias Löwe (2009-now) for award coordination, Nike Wilhelms (2008-now) for PR and press, Nomi (2015-now) for animation, Michael Liebe (2008-2011) for co-founder, Svenja Anhut (2011-now) for guest management, Anjin Anhut (2012) for programme in Berlin, Emily Völker (2009-2012) for animation, Karla Höss (2009-2011) for communication, Jöran Bengt (2009-2012) for visual design, Sebastian Uribe (2014-2019) for workshop coordination, Franziska Zeiner (2015-now) for partner coordination, Merle Leufgen (2016-2018) for festival assistent, Marie Claire Flanagan (2016-2018) for experience design and safe space angel, Ana Jelicic (2015-now) for social media and safe space angel, Ben Myres (2013-2017) for programme in Johannesburg, Steven Walt (2015-2017) for exhibition coordination, Matt Dean (2014-2017) for production, Luca Lombardo (2015-now) for volunteer coordination, Nico Defawe (2010-now) for music coordinition, Christian Kokott and Tobias Herrman (2018-now) for exhibition coordination, Florian Stolzenhain (2012-now) for web design, Beata Niedhart and Oliver Spieker (2012-now) for visual design , Marek Plichta (2010-now) for advice, Philipp Schäfer (2015-now) for open screens coordination, Agustina Palermo (2017-2019) for volunteer coordintion and safe space angel, Caroline Goigoux (2018) for festival assistant, Sithé Ncube (2017-2018) for programme assistant in Johannesburg and Berlin, Miguel Alvarez (2012-2017) exhibition coordination, Verena Lorenz (2019) for head of production, Wahid El Solh (2018) for head of technic, Jamie Tobin (2019) for festival assistant, Csongor Baranyai (2017-now) for Devolution, Iwan Gabovitch (2012-2017) for volunteer coordination, Sebastian Hoogstraten (2019) for workshop coordination assistent, Sergio Grillo (2019) for guest management, Jens Keiner (2008-now) for photo documentation, Julian Dasgupta (2014-2018) for photo documentation, Berk Asal, Dan Dorocic and Michael Maginness (2019) for festival design, Christopher Lukman (2019) for partner relations and all the hundreds of volunteers. Thank you!
This is not our first festival, we have put on 1-2 dozen festivals since 2008. We are very experienced in the production of A MAZE. . Everything new like the commission works or theme curated parts of the festival programme are motivating and will give freshness to the next A MAZE. / Berlin. We are excited!
But it’s our first Kickstarter. We have hoodies, t-shirts, and very rare art works to deliver worldwide. But we are very confident we will manage it as we do everything else. As punk of the digital age we learn a lot from making things happen – sometimes it doesn’t work as we want, but you won’t realize that beforehand. We are very confident that you will be fine and the rewards will come as promised.
At the moment we are still looking for a new location, which is since the start of A MAZE. an annual challenge. We already found interesting and affordable venues which would fit our festival. I’m sure we’ll confirm the location during the Kickstarter ! The festival will definitely take place in Berlin between April 15 and April 25, 2020.
Your support will boost us! E.g. drawing on a very successful Kickstarter would give us a good budget for the first A MAZE. / Nairobi in 2020. We are already working on and making first contact with partners and the local community. Important: We are still trying to get additional funding like from Musicboard, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and as well from the cultural department of the city of Berlin and sponsors. The goal is to build a healthy and financial sustainable setting and this Kickstarter will finally give us air to breathe and create more sustainability.