In this article, the author draws on a semester long freshmen learning community in which multimodal texts were used as primary texts along with traditional texts to support students' academic literacy skills. Analysis shows that a multimodal text created by students contain elements of academic literacies and qualities of multimodal texts. An unexpected finding was the presence of play within the process and product. These elements combine to create multimodal academic literacies, a form drawing on popular and multimodal forms while meeting requirements of academic literacies. The author argues that multimodal academic literacies should be taught alongside traditional essayist forms in order to create rich learning opportunities.