The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack

There is a mention of the Glitch assets, but I did not see any link? Looks like this is a good place to look: https://archive.org/details/glitch-public-domain-game-art

I remember downloading everything when it was released, adding it to my hoard, never using it for anything. The old Glitch site that hosted the content now just redirects to slack.com. It looked like this in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20131209034741/http://www.glitch...

Glitch was such a gem. Stewart's Salesforce exit made him a billionaire. I'm rooting for a fully-endowed Game Neverending 3 that doesn't need to be profitable to survive.

The part of this that never ceases to amaze me is the Butterfield playbook for accidentally successful startups seems to involve making an online games company of some kind, which fails, and then pivoting it into something quite different.

Doing this once is mad enough, but twice? He should be made to try again purely for science.

Very interesting that discord also effectively evolved out of a failed game, albeit a few years after slack.

This was mentioned in "Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away"[0].

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Quit-Power-Knowing-When-Walk/dp/B09PV...

Based on the title I thought this was about Glitch, the chat app that was semi-popular in OSS projects. Or maybe I’m misremembering the name

If Butterfield was calling the product “Slack” from the beginning, I wonder why their iOS app’s bundle ID is com.tinyspeck.chatlyio.

I remember finally getting a version of Chrome that came bundled with Flash on Linux and playing Glitch. Stewart was there to help me through the first part of the game.

:dusty_stick:

A number of great apps were built by game devs.

Anyone know what Butterfield's next thing might be?

I played the preview of Glitch and it really wasn't much of a game. But the chat was good. I told them as much, as others probably did as well.

"And that's what this game is/you're inside their thoughts/go and make them bigger/and you'll play for a long while"

- the video advertising Glitch contained in this post; "their" refers to the eight giants that imagined this world.

That's... that's the best they could do? "You'll play for a long while?" I think that's what the narrator's saying, she kinda mumbles that line, it's all delivered kinda half-heartedly like she's ashamed of the lack of anything to really do in this so-called "game".

It's over a bunch of screenshots of crafting mechanics. And crowds of layer avatars. Was there anything else here? If there was any actual building they sure were not advertising it; there's been a lot of multiplayer games that have less in the way of actual game mechanics but usually there's room for a ton of player-created content, and Glitch sure does not look like it had that, despite the fact that the previous attempt at this thing is what Flickr grew out of.

How the heck did they spend three years on making this thing without ever finding something more compelling to advertise than "uh multiplayer and crafting and some pretty art, I guess"?