Long Live Glitch! The Art & Code from the Game Now Released into the Public Domain

Back in 2009, a start­up called Tiny Speck (whose co-founder Stew­art But­ter­field also co-found­ed Flickr) launched a mul­ti­play­er online video game called Glitch, which won praise for its cre­ative visu­al style. Although more than 150,000 peo­ple played the game, Glitch nev­er quite found its foot­ing in the mar­ket. And, in 2012, it was shut down. But, now Glitch ris­es from the ash­es and lives again.

Yes­ter­day Tiny Speck made this announce­ment:

The entire library of art assets from the game, has been made freely avail­able, ded­i­cat­ed to the pub­lic domain.… All of it can be down­loaded and used by any­one, for any pur­pose. (But: use it for good.)

Tiny Speck … has relin­quished its own­er­ship of copy­right over these 10,000+ assets in the hopes that they help oth­ers in their cre­ative endeav­ours and build on Glitch’s lega­cy of sim­ple fun, cre­ativ­i­ty and an appre­ci­a­tion for the pre­pos­ter­ous. Go and make beau­ti­ful things.

Accord­ing to Tiny Speck, this release “is intend­ed pri­mar­i­ly for devel­op­ers and those with the tech­ni­cal abil­i­ty to take advan­tage of the struc­tured assets.”

Now, assum­ing you have some tech chops, here are some help­ful links that will get you start­ed:

• This pub­lic domain release page con­tains links to the GitHub repos­i­to­ries as well as direct down­load links for devel­op­ers.
• The Glitch archive site offers a “com­pre­hen­sive Ency­clo­pe­dia of the game world, play­er archives and snap­shots from the game, and more.”
• Above you can watch the videos 17 Fun Things To Do in Glitch in 124 Sec­onds. This, com­bined with the Glitch Beta Trail­er, will give you a good overview of the game’s visu­al style.

Long live Glitch!

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