• d3VwsX 19 hours ago

    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...

    • codetrotter 14 hours ago

      > I remember downloading everything when it was released, adding it to my hoard, never using it for anything.

      If you or anyone else in this thread want to do a small short-term favor for others, use a web seed capable BitTorrent client to download the torrent from https://archive.org/details/glitch-public-domain-game-art and keep seeding it for a while. This way other people who want to add it to their hoard can leverage BitTorrent for what it’s best at instead of everyone doing web dl from IA :)

      The BitTorrent client I am using is not web seed capable, but by downloading from other peers I can also keep seeding it for others. I have a computer in my home that’s on 24x7 that I use for seeding some public domain torrents, alongside seeding some open source torrents also.

    • greyface- 2 days ago

      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.

      • wslh 21 hours ago

        > Stewart's Salesforce exit made him a billionaire

        He also co-founded Flickr.

        • lastdong 19 hours ago

          Which was also a by-product of a cancelled game (also massively multiplayer online game) — this one never ended though

          • wslh 4 hours ago

            Yes, the company was Ludicorp [1] and I don't know if your "this one never ended" was a play with the actual title of the game being developed: "Game Neverending" ;-). Here is Stewart talking about this [2].

            [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludicorp

            [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8arwhuU-2c

            • lastdong 2 hours ago

              It was play on the name! Thanks so much for sharing the YouTube link — I really appreciate it!

          • chowchowchow 20 hours ago

            The Flickr acquisition didn’t make anyone close to a billionaire, the whole deal was for $25 million.

            • reassess_blind 18 hours ago

              Better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick.

              • jazzyjackson 19 hours ago

                Maybe one of Yahoo's few W's

                Well, I still don't know if it's profitable for them but at least it has its niche of paying users

                • emddudley 17 hours ago

                  Yahoo (Verizon) did eventually sell Flickr to SmugMug in 2018 for an undisclosed sum.

                • wslh 19 hours ago

                  I just added more context about Stewart as an entrepreneur. It is also important to highlight that Flickr was acquired in 2005 and the acquisition numbers were a fraction of what you see nowadays. Finally, 2005 was just a few years after Internet startups started again after the dot com crash. Google Maps was launched this year and a little bit before Gmail.

            • fidotron a day ago

              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.

              • astrospective 21 hours ago

                For me it’s not even just the pivot, but the internal tool they built incidentally that’s the product they pivot too.

                • wmf 21 hours ago

                  Ev Williams has a similar playbook.

                  • srpablo 20 hours ago

                    My favorite thing said about Ev Williams: with Twitter then Medium, he managed to kill blogging _twice._

                    • c17r 17 hours ago

                      Don't forget Blogger

                • Cannabat 19 hours ago

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

                  • kevingadd 18 hours ago

                    Citron (who founded Discord) also was involved in OpenFeint, a mobile game social SDK that started out originally as a game for the iPhone called Aurora Feint. So it's kind of cyclical in a fun way - game, social tool, game, social tool.

                    I expect this is a pretty common story on a wider basis and people sometimes overlook it. How many bug trackers or build systems started out as internal tools for managing some other product? Etc.

                  • droideqa 20 hours ago

                    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...

                    • JCharante 12 hours ago

                      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

                      • dcrazy 13 hours ago

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

                        • varun_ch 12 hours ago

                          https://buildingslack.com/we-cant-call-it-slack/

                          > We made up some goofy ones, including chatly.io – a gentle joke at the expense of startups using alternative TLDs at the time under the .ly and .io suffixes. We even registered our iOS app under the name com.tinyspeck.chatlyio because we hadn’t settled on a name by the time we needed to make it available for our alpha users to download from the App Store. Slack's iOS app is, in fact, still registered under that name; by the time we secured slack.com in June of 2013, we had thousands of users on iOS and didn't want to make them download a new app. We also weren't confident that they would come back.

                        • mattl 18 hours ago

                          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.

                          • daemonologist a day ago

                            :dusty_stick:

                            • sakesun 16 hours ago

                              A number of great apps were built by game devs.

                              • vichle 20 hours ago

                                Anyone know what Butterfield's next thing might be?

                                • ttul 17 hours ago

                                  Hopefully he gets some rest. I bumped into him in the airport once and he said something to the effect of, “I’m very tired, but I’m not about to stop now. This is the opportunity of a lifetime and I’m not going to get it a second time.”

                                  • anyfoo 20 hours ago

                                    Doesn't seem very well thought out to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5pWqpPCy7c

                                  • greenthrow 17 hours ago

                                    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.

                                    • egypturnash a day ago

                                      "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"?

                                      • jameskilton 21 hours ago

                                        It turns out, there's a huge market for this! Had Glitch not been stuck on Flash and was able to pivot to mobile it may have been a success.

                                        My daughter, her friends, her cousins, are all obsessed with Toca Boca (https://tocaboca.com/) which is nothing more than digital "barbie", a game you can play forever, fully powered by your imagination.

                                        It's also the reason Minecraft is still so popular: it's a platform for creativity. Games don't always have to have an end-goal.

                                        • michaelwilson 21 hours ago

                                          Thanks to the generosity of Stewart and Tiny Speck releasing all the artwork and other assets for the game into public domain, a few non-Flash versions of Glitch showed up. One, Odd Giants (https://oddgiants.com/) is particularly successful and worth checking out if you're a Glitch Fan.

                                          • pm 19 hours ago

                                            I hadn't seen Toca Boca. My friend's niece plays on Everskies, which I believe is something similar.