Glitch: free-to-play, whimsical, delightful MMO from Flickr co-founder

Glitch, the whimsical free-to-play MMO game from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, is now open to the public. Glitch's developer team includes Katamari Damacy creator creator Keita Takahashi, and is as filled with delicious awesomeness as you could possibly hope for. They're overwhelmed with signups, so it might be a few hours before you're confirmed, but they're taking new players and putting them in a queue.

Glitch is a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world.

What's different?

For starters, it's all one big world. Which means everyone is playing the same game and anyone's actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. It also involves very little war, moats, spaceships, wizards, mafiosos, or people with implausibly large muscles. Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different.

What does it look like?

We comb the internet every single day looking for fresh and original visual styles. The look varies as you travel around the world, from psychedelia to surrealism, Japanese cutesie to hypersaturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media. We love awesome illustration and animation and part of our mission is to find the best of the best and bring it to a wider audience.

(via Waxy)

(Disclosure: my wife is an uncompensated advisor to the company that makes Glitch)