Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Jazz Jackrabbit 1 Review Copy

Posted:

17 Jan 2026 at 19:01

Jazz 2 has four known betas, and the gaming world was rocked in late 2024 by the release of Arjan’s original engine that became Jazz 1, but we’ve never had an unfinished version of Jazz 1 that actually includes Jazz… until now. Version 0.9.

Ian Nemec found a floppy labeled “JAZZ JACKRABBIT Confidential copy for reviewers,” and decided to put it on archive.org. He was then very generous with his time and resources when I emailed him for help getting the files and asking his permission to release them to J2O. Here’s Ian’s story in his own words:

So I remember Jazz Jackrabbit when I got a demo disk for it on my freshly built 486 back when I was 11. I played the heck out of that demo that I think I got free from a visit to the Palo Alto Frys when visiting my uncle. I didnt get the full version until several months later and I played through it quite a few times. When growing up I didnt have consoles I got PC games and components instead, so for me it was the closest to being Sonic the Hedgehog, but with a gun.

I found this review copy while working as an IT for a newspaper group in Livingston, Montana of all places. It was among a pile of ancient photo backup floppies for whatever reason. I snagged it and grabbed a trusty USB to floppy drive and had to wrestle it off of the aging disk. I finally got a clean copy when I dusted off an old Dell XPS laptop I had laying around still running windows 7, 10 and 11 right refused to copy it in its entirety.

You can download the Reviewer Copy here and run it just like your other DOS games, e.g. by modifying an existing DOSBox shortcut, or play it online if you don’t want to look at the individual files.

I’ve also created a JCF thread for listing differences between 0.9 and 1.0. Don’t read if you don’t want to be spoiled before playing!

- Violet CLM