Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder’s gaming start-up
Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder’s gaming start-up | Geek Gestalt – CNET News
Tiny Speck, a company started by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and three partners, is unveiling its new game, Glitch, on Tuesday. The company has been under the radar since it was founded last March, and no one has known what was being developed. But CNET’s Daniel Terdiman reports from behind the scenes.
SAN FRANCISCO–Stewart Butterfield and his business partner Cal Henderson stared at the MacBook Pro in front of them.
For nearly a year, they’d been struggling to figure out what to call the game their start-up was building. Any time a team member loaded a working version, they’d sit through a few seconds of a splash screen with nothing on it but a generic title featuring little more than the name and logo of their company.
But now, the group had finally given their baby an official moniker: Glitch. And this was one of the first times the two had sat through the splash screen since plunking down a low-five-figure sum to buy glitch.com.
Butterfield and Henderson, dressed casually, were hovering over the computer in the bright, east-facing front room in a beautiful Victorian vacation rental that they’d been using for a four-day company off-site in mid-January. Everyone else had already left. Energized from an intense four days of brainstorming (and maybe a coffee run to a local hot spot called the Mercury Cafe) they were running a demo of their game. Watching the bland screen load as they had countless times before, Henderson’s eyes lit up.
“I guess we could replace that with the title of the game now, couldn’t we,”
