Jason Rohrer

Jason Rohrer is an American programmer, writer and game designer born in 1977, and one of the pioneers of art games. A Cornell graduate, he puts most of his games' source code and assets into the public domain and sells versions on platforms like Steam. In the 2000s he and his family practiced simple living on a very small budget.

His five-minute game Passage (2007), about life and mortality, entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 2012. Between won the first IGF Innovation Award in 2009, and he won the 2011 GDC Game Design Challenge with Chain World, a Minecraft mod passed hand to hand on a single USB stick. In 2016 he became the first video game artist with a solo museum retrospective, at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

Later works include The Castle Doctrine (2014), Project December, an AI chatbot service, and One Hour One Life (2018), a multiplayer game where each life lasts an hour; it grossed almost $700,000 in its first four months on Steam. He stopped developing One Hour One Life in November 2025 to work on new projects, including the upcoming Chessamphetamine.