Glitch launches; CNET offers an instant-entry pass

Update (Tuesday, 12:21 p.m. PDT): All 109 of the instant-entries to Glitch are now gone.

You could soon be inside the imagination of ancient giants. That is, if you sign up for Glitch, the first game from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's new company, which is launching this morning.

As CNET was first to report, Glitch is from Tiny Speck, the San Francisco-based startup run by Butterfield and other Flickr veterans including Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. It is a puzzle-heavy, Web-based social game built around sending players billions of years into the past to develop the optimistic future that today seems increasingly unlikely.

"The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants," Butterfield told CNET last year. "So you have to go back into the past, into the world of the giants' imaginations and grow...the number of things in the world, grow it in terms of physical dimensions, to make sure the future actually happens. So all the game play takes place in the past inside the world of the giants' imagination."

"Designers and players create the Glitch universe in tandem, the former constantly modifying and improving the platform, while the latter cultivates a sophisticated and irreverent online civilization," Tiny Speck said in its launch announcement. "And nearly anything can be created and experienced: from curating an art installation, to hosting a diamond-infused dinner party, riding the subway, building a house or hosting a gathering with friends outside the great Bureaucratic Hall. Glitch is not a 'click for click's sake' type of game; rather it respects the value of play to human life."

Glitch, which was designed with an artistic aesthetic, has been in closed beta for months, but already thousands of people have played the game. Now, it will be open to the public. Because there is expected to be heavy demand to get in, Tiny Speck is cautioning that there could be delays for those just signing up now. But CNET has your back. The first 109 people to sign up using this URL will jump the line and get right into the free game.