A couple of years ago Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield quit Yahoo with a memo stating that he "don't need no fancy parties or gold watches" and said he was quitting to look after "my small but growing alpaca herd". And i'm starting to think that that alpha herd was Tiny Speck, a design team largely made up of former flickr co-workers, and for the past year they have been working on a massively multiplayer game called Glitch.
Now when i say massive i mean it. The game is playable in the browser and is apparently "Built in the spirit of the web". It's all one big world, everyone is playing the same game as everyone else and every single person's actions has the ability to affect every other player in the game. Tiny speck has searched the internet (and continues to do so) looking for fresh and original visual styles to incorporate into the game. In other words the look varies as you travel around the gaming world. "From psychedelia to surrealism, Japanese cutesie to hypersaturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media. We love awesome illustration and animation and part of our mission is to find the best of the best and bring it to a wider audience"
The storyline is incredibly strange (which is expected from Steward Butterfield) and the visuals even stranger, but this is what makes this game so interesting. The game wil be released late 2010 and wil be free to play with the exception of some in game extras. You can try and follow it's development on their twitter page, but the tweets are as strange as everything else connected to this game, or you can visit the official website. Meanwhile check out the first trailer over here, and don't mind the character, it's only a place holder.
Speaking of glitches. Do you know the reason we call problems with electronic equipment bugs? Apparently we call them bugs because Grace Hopper found the first computer “bug”: a moth stuck between the relays on the Harvard Mark II on September 9, 1945. These early computers were attracting lots of moths who got stuck between the light-bulbs inside the machines. At times there were so many relays malfunctioning that they had a full time bulb changer working to fix find all the ‘Bugs’ stuck between relays. Now you know.
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