I'm Building a New Multiplayer Game Platform

I've been thinking about it ever since.

Not the acquisition or the shutdown — the thing itself. What made it work. Why people stayed. What we got right, what we got wrong, and what I'd do differently if I started over with everything I know now.

So that's what I'm doing.

What Went Wrong the First Time

OMGPOP worked because the games were an excuse to hang out. You'd join a lobby, play Balloono or Blockles or Draw My Thing, talk trash in chat, and suddenly it was midnight. The games were 3 to 15 minutes each — long enough to care, short enough to say "one more."

But there was a problem we never fully solved: when someone left mid-game, it could ruin the experience for everyone else. A 10-minute game needs commitment. If your friend gets a phone call or their kid wakes up, the match falls apart. In a group of 6, someone always has to go.

We also built the whole thing on Flash. You know how that ended.

The Fix: Make the Games Shorter

The core insight is simple: if every game is 10 seconds to 90 seconds, nobody leaving matters. The round is already over. Next game loads, everyone's back in. The fun never stops.

Think WarioWare meets the web. A rapid-fire series of microgames — racing, dodging, solving, competing — one after another. Some are 10-second reflex tests. Some are 90-second strategy games. They alternate to keep the energy moving. A series takes maybe 15 minutes. You hit rematch. An hour goes by.

The session structure is the product. It's designed so that "one more round" is always the easiest decision in the world.

Zero Friction, Still

The best thing about OMGPOP was how easy it was to start playing. Browser game, no download, just show up. We're keeping that — and pushing it further.

Send a link. Your friend clicks it. They pick a name. They're playing. No account, no download, no app store, no install. The gap between "want to play" and "playing" is seconds. If they have fun, they can make an account later to keep their stuff. But the first session is free and instant.

This matters more than almost any feature. Every barrier you add between someone and the game is a percentage of people who never make it through. We want that number as close to zero as possible.

The Drama Engine

Here's the thing that's genuinely new.

Sports broadcasts don't just show the game — they show the story. "This is the first time these teams have met since the championship." That context turns a regular game into something you care about. We're building that for players.

The platform tracks every head-to-head result between players. Every win, every loss, every game, across every session. And it surfaces that data dramatically.

"Charles has NEVER beaten Kristina in Balloon Pop."

"Sarah is on a 5-game win streak."

"REVENGE MATCH."

When an underdog faces a dominant rival, a bounty activates. If the underdog finally wins, the game celebrates it — special animations, fanfare, the whole thing. At the end of the night, you get a recap: who dominated, who made comebacks, which rivalries shifted.

Other party games are fun in the moment and then you forget. This one builds stories over time. That loss from last Tuesday still counts. Your friend's 12-0 record against you in that one game is sitting there, waiting for you to break it.

The drama engine turns casual games into something personal. It gives you a reason to come back that isn't just "the games are fun" — it's "I have unfinished business."

Characters

We're going with a Kirby-inspired style. Simple shapes, big heads, expressive through animation rather than detail. Think cute, toylike, readable — you need to be able to tell 8 characters apart at a glance during a frantic microgame.

Every character shares the same skeleton, which means any animation works on any character. When a game takes place underwater, everyone automatically gets a scuba mask. Racing game? Helmets. Your customization — colors, accessories, emotes — still shows through.

This is partly an art direction choice and partly a production reality. A small team can't build bespoke animations for 20 different character rigs. One shared skeleton means every new animation we make works everywhere, and every new character we add gets the full library for free.

Server Authoritative, Because Cheating Ruins Everything

All game logic runs on the server. Clients send inputs, the server sends back the state of the world. You can't cheat by modifying the client because the client doesn't decide anything. This is more work to build but it's the only way to run competitive multiplayer that people trust.

The simulation is deterministic — seeded random numbers, fixed tick rate, no Math.random(). Same inputs always produce same outputs. This means we can do replays, verify results, and catch anything suspicious.

What I Hope This Becomes

The vision is a platform with dozens — eventually hundreds — of microgames spanning every genre. Reflex games, puzzle games, racing, rhythm, trivia, dexterity. A library that feels fresh no matter how many times you play, because the combination of games and the people you're playing with are different every session.

Characters you collect and customize. Rivalries that build over weeks and months. Moments that make you screenshot the results screen and send it to the group chat. "FINALLY beat you."

A place where you send a link to your friends on a Tuesday night and an hour disappears.

I want to build the thing OMGPOP was becoming before it got swallowed — but with modern web tech instead of Flash, with microgames instead of 10-minute commitments, and with a system that remembers your history and makes every session feel like it matters.

Small team. Self-funded. Building it because I think it should exist.

If you played OMGPOP back in the day, you know the feeling I'm chasing. If you didn't — that's fine. You'll get it when you play.

Charles Forman is the co-founder of OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga, 2012). He is building a new multiplayer game platform with Jason.