We talk videogames with tech pioneer Stewart Butterfield
If you ever want proof that games write the first draft of history, you need to look no further than the last ten years of Stewart Butterfield’s work. His early experiments with an MMO called Game Neverending yielded a kernel of a photo-sharing app. It was called Flickr, and sold to Yahoo! in 2005.
Then, in 2009, Butterfield founded Tiny Speck, pulling in game vets like Journey’s Robin Hunicke and Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahasi, to launch a browser-based online game called Glitch. Beloved by many—but ultimately not enough—fans, Glitch shuttered in 2012.
But again a seed grew. Butterfield transitioned some of Tiny Speck’s staff, alongside some hard-learned lessons about onboarding new users to build a commercial communication tool that Tiny Speck had used to build Glitch. Last August, Slack was launched as an “email killer” and a way to transform how businesses talk and do work together. (We use it at Kill Screen, in fact.)
Here, in an edited transcript, Butterfield opens up about his early game-playing roots, teaching new players the basics, and why games are “too fucking hard.”
