International Designers Come Together for Flickr Founders' Gaming Glitch

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Designer Chris Leavens at his Unloosen site [1] has posted a link to the launch of Tiny Speck's new massively-multiplayer game, GLITCH. Watch the trailer here [2]. Leavens is among a selection of international designers working on the project for the start-up, whose founders include four of the founders of Flickr.

CNET [3] has an extensive report on Tiny Speck, its founders and the game. Stewart Butterfield, Cal Henderson, Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov pitched the idea to investors as an MMO that would do for the Internet what the Wii did for consoles.

The Glitch site describes the game as follows: "It's called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the "glitch" — a grave danger of disemprobablization."

"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 and ... you know what? You'll probably just have to wait and play the game."

The non-violent dreamlike game is one world where players will effect and develop the world on their own. As players travel through the world design styles change from Japanese cutesy to surrealism to psychedelic. Players will develop their own economic, political and religious affiliations and vie for new converts. The game will be scripted in Javascript, making it easy to change items, places and characters in the game. The MMO will be free to play with some game items available for purchase, including keys to locked sections of the world. Tiny Speck plans to have the game available to players by the end of 2010.