It started with a simple idea—an online version of the classic arcade game Asteroids, but on a massively multiplayer scale.
It would support hundreds of players at once, thanks to a scalable network backend. It would be real-time, meaning that every player would see every shot and every movement simultaneously without delay.
Unfortunately for the Hacker News community—where an MMO Asteroids “prototype” would eventually make the front page—it all turned out to be fake. April Fools.
[…] Vikrum Nijjar, however, took that as a challenge. He believed it could be done. And as luck would have it, he had been developing just the software needed to make it a reality
[…] His MMO Asteroids prototype made the Hacker News front page too. And this time, it was actually real
I've been dreaming of large scale real-time interactive games for a long time. This piece breaks down the events that led to the MMO Asteroids project and also looks at the underlying technology and where we might be headed in terms of true, large scale real-time interactions on the web.
I've joined the Svbtle network. I've long been an admirer of the work that Dustin Curtis has done and I'm excited and honored to join the network:
The Svbtle Network is an experiment that brings some of the best things from newspapers (editing, vetting, etc) to a network of independent bloggers. It is focused on the writing, the news, and the ideas. Everything else is secondary. - Codename: Svbtle
Why am I joining? Because I'm fanatical about content. And typography. And the force of ideas.
Who Am I?
I'm a tech geek, marketer and fiercely curious individual. I live in Brooklyn, NY and work for Distilled.
The State of Svbtle
Those are the colors currently present on the network. And now there's me too:
Stats
Since I'm a maths geek I thought I'd break down what's going on with Svbtle right now. As of writing there are:
28 writers on Svbtle (not including me)
595 posts written on Svbtle (not including this one)
422 posts written on Svbtle excluding Dustin Curtis
I look forward to contributing my thoughts and writing to the future of Svbtle. In the meantime, I've shifted my essays to essays.tomcritchlow.com where you can still find The Art of Being Switched On.