Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Jazz Jackrabbit 1 Review Copy - January 17th 2026

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!

New album, "Tubelectric Guitar: A Tribute to Jazz Jackrabbit 2" - January 16th 2026

Source: JCF thread

A new album of Jazz 2 covers has just dropped on Bandcamp, with 26 songs!

Despite the “Tubelectric Guitar” album name, other instruments include bass, keyboard, and drums. It appears to be mostly the work of JCF user OmriLahav, who has been working on these songs for over a decade.

Unlike most Jazz fan works, this is a commercial release. The credits site notes that “Materia Collective takes great care to ensure that all cover song recordings are licensed and in full compliance with applicable laws,” and a preview yesterday noted that Alexander Brandon has provided “incredible support in this process.”

Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.6 - January 6th 2026

Source: JJ2+

Version 6.6 of JJ2+ is now available! Today’s the 6th of 2026, what better date could you ask for?

Let’s have a history lesson. Here was the player list (in CTF) in vanilla JJ2:

This was the list from most of JJ2+‘s history. It added a lot of new information, but could be hard to read, with unexplained symbols like “M” and “S” and “A” and “*”. The asterisks were even drawn inconsistently in different gamemodes. It also drew “+” next to plus players’ names, which made sense in 2008 when running plus was rare, but is just unnecessary detail in 2026.

Version 6.4 started to tackle the problem of unexplained symbols, and moved the flag icon farther left, to a position consistent across gamemodes, so that it wouldn’t be obscured by other data. However, this led to the list being even more cluttered than before, and sometimes there was a lot of horizontal space between the flag (or other such icons) and the player’s name.

Following extensive community discussion and numerous public test builds, we’re happy to release 6.6 with a focus on being easy to read. The useless “+” symbols are gone; the redundant spectator eyes/scores are gone; the unclear “M” and “A” letters are replaced with graphics and moved to the right where less time-sensitive information goes; spacing is improved everywhere; and flags (and other such icons) are drawn immediately next to player names.

Because JJ2+ used to draw “*” in different positions in different gamemodes, some players may be more comfortable seeing icons on the right side of player names instead, so 6.6 has a new alternate display mode for those players who disable the new “Icons Left of Names” option.

As mentioned, this was the result of a long, very productive discussion in our issues tracker. There are about 90 different open threads at the moment, far more than we can possibly prioritize, so always remember to reply to the threads that have ideas that you want to see added/fixed in future. That’s the only way that JJ2+ developers can know which ideas are important to the community.

You can download 6.6 in-game or in-browser.