Game Neverending

» see gameneverending.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Ludicorp Research and Development Ltd. was founded in Vancouver in 2002 by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, with Jason Classon as the third name on the paperwork. The company had one product idea and it was a game. Public alpha tests of the prototype began in September 2002, and the front page quoted James Carse on finite and infinite games before it got around to telling you what the thing was.

What it was: a web-based world of social and economic interaction with no way to win. You picked up objects, you combined objects to make other objects, you left notes for people, you talked in channels. There was currency, some of it called shekels and some of it colored paper. Players catalogued the item list themselves into something the site called the Encyclopedia Instancia, and fan sites grew up around a game that had never been publicly released. The prototype was taken down on 3 February 2003 and a closed beta replaced it, with a signup queue you joined and waited in.

Inside the game was a tool for passing files and photos between players in real time. In late 2003 the company took that tool out, spent about eight weeks turning it into a standalone product, and launched Flickr in February 2004. Flickr worked immediately in a way the game never had. Yahoo bought Ludicorp on 20 March 2005 on the strength of it, and Flickr URLs carried a .gne file extension for years afterward, which is the fossil of where it came from.

Flickr I knew, from around 2005. The game Flickr was cut out of I never saw, and almost nobody did: it lived its whole life behind an invite queue, and its players came out of the English-language weblog crowd of 2002. I was eighteen that autumn, sitting in an internet cafe in Ankara where the machines were booked by the hour for Counter-Strike.

~ the dossier ~

~ the note on the front page ~

Sometime between mid-October and the start of November 2004, the homepage was replaced. "We are very sad," it opened. "Game Neverending is being put up on blocks indefinitely. Flickr, Ludicorp's online community and photo sharing site, is on fire, and as a small company we don't have the resources to build both simultaneously."

The forums stayed open two more weeks so people could swap contact details. Anyone holding a pioneer account was told to write to Caterina and they would be given a year of Flickr Pro for nothing. The closing line thanked players for two years and said goodbye. The site itself came down on 2 November 2004, and that sentence is the only place the exact date is written.

~ the april fools resurrection ~

On 1 April 2008 the game came back. Cal Henderson and Myles Grant, both from the original team, had ported the old ASP codebase to PHP and put it up at gne.flickr.com, and for a few hours people who had not logged in since 2004 were back in the item world. It was announced as a prank and then quietly extended past midnight, completely unsupported. It went off again around 11am Pacific on 2 April.

~ the pattern ~

Butterfield did the whole thing a second time. Tiny Speck spent four years on Glitch, another browser game about making things and talking, and closed it in December 2012. The internal chat tool the studio had built for itself became Slack. Both times the game was the failed object and the thing built next to it became the company. Game Neverending is the first draft of that story, and the only one of the two that nobody outside the beta ever got to play.

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