Glitch

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

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard of glitch was through the slack story in 2014, which means i learned about glitch the way most people did, after the company that made it had stopped making it. tiny speck launched the game on september 27, 2011 after about two years of development. stewart butterfield ran the studio. he had previously co-founded flickr, sold it to yahoo in 2005, left in 2008, and started tiny speck the year after to build a casual collaborative mmo that had nothing to do with photo sharing. the lead designer was keita takahashi of katamari damacy fame, brought in to bend the art into the right kind of strange.

the world was called ur. eleven sleeping giants had dreamed it into being, and the players were the inhabitants of those dreams, which gave the game its baseline tone. mechanically you cooked, you gathered, you crafted, you socialized, and almost never killed anything. the visual language was hand-illustrated 2d running in adobe flash inside a browser tab, which by 2011 was already a genuinely brave choice. flash penetration was still high enough to make the math work, but the platform was on its way out and any browser mmo built on it was building on top of a foundation that was scheduled for demolition.

i did not play it. by 2011 i was working full time as a software engineer in turkey, well past the age and the available-hours bracket where a free-to-play browser mmo was going to find me. what made me read the postmortem later was the fact that the company shipped a product that absolutely did not look like it would survive its first year, and then survived by accident on the back of a tool nobody outside the office had been meant to see.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

the launch numbers were soft. tiny speck reverted glitch to beta on november 30, 2011, two months after the official 1.0, with butterfield publicly admitting the retention curve was not working. accessibility was the cited problem: new players could not figure out what they were supposed to do in the first thirty minutes, and they bounced before the social hooks could take hold. the team spent 2012 redesigning onboarding. it did not save the game. on november 14, 2012 the studio announced glitch would shut down within a month. the servers went off on december 9, 2012.

butterfield wrote a long shutdown post that read more like an obituary than a press release. the players had built friend networks inside ur that did not have anywhere obvious to go. tiny speck refunded all unspent in-game currency in real money, which was a generous move that almost no shut-down free-to-play game had bothered with before. about a year after closing, the studio released the game's source code and most of its art under creative commons zero. fan emulators picked the assets up and shipped at least three separate revival attempts, including children of ur and eleven, both of which still run as small communities.

~ what it became ~

the chat tool. while making glitch, tiny speck had built an internal real-time messaging system to coordinate the distributed team. when the game shut down in december 2012 the company had eight people and a small bank balance, plus that internal tool nobody outside the office had seen. butterfield's read of the situation was that the chat tool was the actually-shippable product on the table. the studio rebuilt it as a commercial saas, opened a preview in 2013 under the name slack, and went into general availability in february 2014. by 2015 it was worth roughly 3 billion dollars on private markets. by 2021 salesforce had bought it for 27.7 billion after a 2019 ipo in between. tiny speck had renamed itself slack technologies along the way.

the lesson the tech press kept printing for years afterward was about the value of paying attention to your internal tools. that was the headline. the smaller and more specific lesson was that butterfield had now done the same trick twice: flickr was originally a side feature of a game called game neverending that did not ship, and slack was the side feature of glitch. both times the actual game was the failed object and a piece of infrastructure built next to it became the company. once is luck, twice is a pattern.

~ what got buried with it ~

ur itself, as a place. fan emulators have rebuilt the geometry and ported the art, but the original servers running the original economy with the original quest scripts went dark in december 2012 and have not come back. for the players who lived in ur for fourteen months, the world they socialized in is preserved as creative-commons assets and screenshots rather than a runnable destination. that is more than most flash games got, but it is less than the players had while the game was open.

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