Flickr Co-Founder Returns to Roots

Some of you might know that popular photo sharing service Flickr was originally a set of tools built for a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. In November of 2009 we also reported that Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, had left Flickr and was returning to his original project, Game Neverending.

With a group of former Flickr employees, Butterfield started a small company called Tiny Speck, which just unveiled Glitch, a massively multiplayer game played through a browser. Here’s a trailer they’ve released:

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 :)

Here’s a side by side comparison between an old screenshot of Game Neverending (left) and a new screenshot of Glitch (right):

We’re not sure how a game like this spawned Flickr, but it doesn’t seem as though Glitch will have anything to do with photography. Perhaps the tools were originally used for in-game images and graphics rather than photographs…

Glitch will be free of charge and available by the end of the year.