There’s no lack of reviews of dead games on this site. Deceive Inc is on life support. Crowfall went offline for “future planning” multiple years ago at this point. Crimesight wasn’t a live service game, but got taken offline anyway, because the world is stupid.
Glitch is a little different than those games because it went offline almost 13 years ago. It was a weird little browser MMO with (almost) no combat, and a sort of friendly Hieronymus Bosch vibe. You hatched pigs from eggs, which you grew on eggplant trees, and stumbled around the dreams of giants.
But that’s not what really separated Glitch from all of those other games. What separates Glitch is its long term impact on the world. Not via its mechanics, gameplay, design, or aesthetics, but because while Glitch was being made, its creators also made an internal communication tool for the project.
That was tool was called Slack.
I don’t know if there’s actually some sort of deep irony in one of the few attempts to build a really weird, interesting, peaceful MMO led to the creation of one of the most bland pieces of business software ever to exist. Something about it seems a bit bullshit.
Still, when so many live-service games just vanish and die, it’s nice to see that Glitch has some form of legacy, even if its legacy is completely disconnected from the game itself.
As I found myself being forced to use Slack this morning, I also found myself thinking back to Glitch: to weird landscapes, trying to grow trees, and fights with crows. To a smaller, nicer thing, that not enough people (including me!) paid for, and it died.
Anywayyyy, back to work.