In the latest edition of the Georgia Straight I write about why “Glitch”, the clever, social MMO being developed in Vancouver, had a “big unlaunching”.

It’s not every day that a video game gets released to market and then recalled. But that’s exactly what happened with Glitch. Tiny Speck, which is developing the massively multiplayer online social game, decided to move Glitch out of beta testing in September. Two months later, the developers changed their minds.

This was just a few months after Keita Takahashi, the creative creator of Katamari Damacy, joined Tiny Speck’s dev team.

Stewart Butterfield raised some eyebrows when he hired Keita Takahashi to join Tiny Speck. As Butterfield admits, Takahashi doesn’t have a game-design background. And the Japanese sculptor, best known for creating the remarkable game Katamari Damacy, quit the video-game industry in 2010, suggesting that he might be done with games.