This article was originally published in Issue 7 of the ICG Zine, September 2024. It was reformatted in January 2026, but has not been edited further.

Brice: Hello! My name is Brice Puls, and I am a game and interactive installation designer as well as one of the co-founders and current Director of Exhibitions for Bit Bash Chicago!

Seb: How did Bit Bash start?

Brice: Bit Bash was founded in April of 2014 by a group of game developers in Indie City Games. We’d all gone to GDC that year and attended the Wild Rumpus, an annual party for indie game developers which essentially was this exciting evening of unique games and live performances, set in this energetic and positive-feeling space.

A couple days later, we were all hanging out in a hotel bar talking about how we should bring an experience with that vibe to Chicago, which at the time was dealing with the fallout of several AAA studios in the area shutting down, and people were unsure of Chicago’s future as a hub for the game industry. We ultimately settled on a festival concept, taking the tone of a music festival, with multiple areas and stages and things going on simultaneously, and bringing that feeling over to games.

It was a core goal to make sure that Bit Bash never felt like a gamer-focused event. We wanted to make a space where people from all levels of game literacy could come and learn a bit about all the unique and interesting things that are being done in video games, beyond just the most high-profile of releases.

So, one of our other co-founders, Ryan Wiemeyer, had a connection with Threadless, who had been looking to use their space at the time to host more events and long story short, we spent that spring and summer planning our first event. We went through all the wild hurdles of figuring out how to put a fest like this on, and we had our first Bit Bash at Threadless on September 6th, 2014.

We planned for about 400 people to show up, over 1,600 people did.

Seb: What’s your favorite thing about seeing Bit Bash come together?

Brice: One of our worst qualities as an organization is that we can be hard on ourselves when planning these events, we always see room for improvement, or think about these little things that went wrong, or plans that ultimately didn’t work out. So, we always need somebody to step back and acknowledge “Hey, this thing we do is successful, people like it, we’re still here doing it, we like doing it. We can take the things to improve to heart but look at how many artists and attendees enjoy what we make. We should be proud of what we put together.”

That leads to what’s an obvious answer, but it’s usually about an hour or two into one of our events, where we can acknowledge things are going well and finally relax, take a breath, have a drink, and hang out with everyone, it’s one of the greatest feelings there is. It’s an absolute high, being around people who are having a good time is one of the things that makes me happiest in life.

Seb: What has it been like re-awakening Bit Bash since the pandemic?

Brice: We talked a little bit during the pandemic about what we could do, but so much of our vibe and identity is based on this feeling of being in a communal space, meeting people, playing with friends and strangers, and discovering new things around every corner.

We collaborated on a few bundles, but mostly spent time behind the scenes restructuring and securing a future for our team. The Chicago Foundation for the Interactive Arts, our fiscal sponsor at the time, was shutting down operations, and the Indie City Co-Op, where we’d stored our equipment, was closing as well. I had recently become even more involved in the Video Game Arts Foundation, a non-profit which operated VGA Gallery, which had also closed its physical space in the pandemic, and we decided to combine our logistical and artistic resources and operate Bit Bash Chicago as a program of the VGA Foundation.

After that, we started finding new volunteers who wanted to help organize our events (we’re always still lookin’, hit us up!), and we put on a few smaller fests in 2022 and 2023 as public gatherings began coming back, collaborating with the Chicago Humanities Festival, The Verge, and the Japanese Arts Foundation, as a way to get our sea legs back and help our newer members learn what it takes to put on a Bit Bash event.

Our current goal is to put on more events like our recent Xtreme Bit Bash and our “Bit Bash Presents” themed events pre-pandemic. It’s so fun to create a themed space and really push the boundaries of whatever idea we settle on, and while we do want to scale larger in the future, event costs have skyrocketed since we began, finding venues is more and more expensive, so without a partner with a lot of space in place, putting on one of our 1000-2000+ person events is extremely difficult right now.

Plus, we’ve been doing this for over 10 years, so now that we’re all in our 30s and 40s, life gets in the way far more often. Ultimately, we love doing events around the 300- to 600-person scale, it gives us so much more freedom and creativity to put time into décor and tone and aesthetic, we’re just really happy there’s people who like what we do and want to keep on coming to our fests.

Seb: What is your favorite edition of Bit Bash?

Brice: While I have deep nostalgia for our early warehouse party pseudo-rave days back at Threadless, I think my favorite was Bit Bash Presents: Initiation. That was what really got the juices flowing on how deep we could go into these themed events; we created a whole secret symbol with its own code language, we had this whole yarn wall of lore that tied back to previous Bit Bash events that attendees could add themselves to via photos printed from the game Interstellar Selfie Station, we wrote an entire fake newspaper of articles and jokes and puzzles that had all these meta tie-ins to the games we were showing which people could pick up and take home. It was such a great evening, I loved that one.

Seb: What’s been your favorite game shown at Bit Bash?

Brice: Incredibly tough question. We’ve got a whole archive of nearly every game we’ve ever shown at one of our events on our website (check it out at https://bitbashchicago.com/games/), there’s still a few we still got to add in there.

I do love it whenever we get to show something that literally requires a player to be there, something you could never play at home, so I’m going to go with One Night Only, a live game by Amanda Hudgens which we had at Bit Bash 2019, at the Museum of Science and Industry. We crowded a bunch of people into an actual theater, and then they’d use these cheap guitars Amanda had rigged to play a Guitar Hero-esque game, but at the end of every song, whomever was playing had to just haul off and smash that actual, physical guitar into tiny, tiny pieces, and the impacts of smashing the guitar would be part of the player’s score.

Any time we can facilitate those kinds of experiences, that’s where I feel like Bit Bash thrives. If anybody’s ever got an idea in that space, come talk to us! We don’t got a ton of cash, but we love to collaborate with artists that have creative ideas for games like that.