Relive The Glory Days Of Defunct MMO Glitch In This Endless Runner for iOS 7

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

If you ever had a chance to play Glitch, screenshots like the one above may give you a little pang of loss whenever you come across them. The beautifully unique MMO world of Glitch has been gone for almost a year now, yet that picture up there is entirely new.

Thanks to the work of a former Glitch developer, you can run through the strange and sprawling world of Ur once more, free of charge, on your iOS device of choice. There's more to this story than just another endless runner, though...

Glitch Run is an endless runner-style game with the lush meadows and forests of Groddle for your track, and loads of Glitch avatars to choose from for your runner. The legend was that when the giants of Ur fell asleep, they dreamed the world and all of its inhabitants up together. When Glitch closed, it was the giants waking up, and the world ended with a lullaby. Maybe with that in mind, Glitch Run should be thought of as a giant cat nap.

It isn't the official singleplayer mobile port of Glitch that some of us (or maybe just me?) have been hoping for, nor is it a sign of similar things to come. I'll admit that when I first saw it, it did get my hopes up just a little bit. It was easy to read more into its existence than I should have--after all, it has all that official artwork, right? It turns out that and official version of Glitch Run (and Glitch API that would have been used to connect it to Glitch itself, even letting you pull in your actual avatar) had been in the works since 2011, but the app never quite got off the ground. In a bittersweet twist, David Wilkinson (the developer who worked on that with Tiny Speck) has released Glitch Run himself, nearly a year after the game closed, using the original resources with Tiny Speck's blessing.

The goal of endless runners is essentially to get as far as you can as fast as you can, but for me Glitch Run feels different. It's a chance to move around in a world that had been lost; a world I developed a lot of fondness for only when it was too late for that fondness to matter. It's a pocket-sized hit of nostalgia. So maybe I won't run so fast. Maybe I'll get caught up on a few obstacles. Maybe I'll do what I can to make all of that last just a bit longer. 

(Hat tip: Marianne McCann)

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Timesand has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan andwith pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[sparky]

This is great, now if I only had an ios device...

[Rudi]

http://vimeo.com/44065902 glitch was the best game evah!! thanks for letting me know bout the runner, will try! is there a cyclops runner too? hope so o)

[Iggy]

In a sane world, Glitch would be bigger than the NFL.

Damn it all, but I miss Tiny Speck's brand of whimsy.

Instead of Glitch, we have morbidly fat spectators, stuffing themselves with deadly "food stuffs," all the while watching steroidal hulks, full of rage and racism, smash into each other until brain damage results.

In Glitch we had a culture where little bobble-heads, in Tiki masks, squeezed chickens and hugged plants that had broken hearts.

You tell me what is less sane.

[Silly Rabbit]

@Iggy: We ignore Evolutionary Biology at our own peril...

[James Corachea]

I miss Glitch. Since then I've got into the less casual and arguably less imaginative MMOs but Glitch will always be my first.

The other spin-off app that's still going is Glitchamaphone - http://www.glitchamaphone.com
Some of the official artwork is there but only static backgrounds and modified characters