Tiny Speck, a company started by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, has just opened a massively-multiplayer, browser-based game called Glitch to alpha testers, giving the world a taste of what Glitch might look like.
There are essentially two schools of multiplayer gaming right now. Massively-multiplayer games, most notably World of Warcraft, have been popular for a long time. They typically have huge worlds, tons of players, and a never-ending number of things you can do and explore. On the other side of the coin are the social games like Farmville and Petville, which are so popular on Facebook and the like. They’re typically simple, run in the browser, and aren’t particularly in-depth.
Glitch appears to be somewhere in the middle. It’s a browser-based game, meaning there’s no software to install or special computer requirements—more like Farmville. But i has huge levels and long quests, will require a lot of thought, multiplayer coordination and strategy, and as co-founder Stewart Butterfield told CNET, is for “people with above average intelligence and sophisticated tastes…the intersection of NPR listeners and game players.” Glitch is walking the line between casual social games, and intense, multiplayer, life-consuming games.
The only thing already available as far as the game itself goes is a short preview video. It’s a little cryptic, but appeared to me to be one part Mario, one part acid trip, and one part something completely other. The website offers more of an explanation, describing a journey back to the distant past, to fix the glitch that caused the terrible future that’s coming to us: “This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and hum the world into existence…”
The way the game is built is equally exciting. It was built mostly in Java and Javascript, meaning that it can run in any browser, it can be easily maintained and updated by Tiny Speck, and that new content can be deployed without forcing users to buy new discs, and spend more money. If this works, building a huge, massively-multiplayer game into the browser, it could change how people play games over the Internet. (Of course, a number of browser-based games are being built using Unity Technologies’ 3-D game plug-in).
Tiny Speck is releasing Glitch into private alpha, but it’s looking for testers. The company is letting people into the alpha slowly but steadily, so sign up, but be ready to wait a little while. If you’re not one of the lucky ones, don’t worry. The game will be released to the general public sometime in 2010.
Tiny Speck was started by Butterfield and three members of the Flickr team, and has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Accel and angels like Marc Andreessen and Jeff Weiner.
