The “Real” Real-Time Web  

It started with a simple idea—an online version of the classic arcade game Asteroids, but on a massively multiplayer scale.

It would support hundreds of players at once, thanks to a scalable network backend. It would be real-time, meaning that every player would see every shot and every movement simultaneously without delay.

Unfortunately for the Hacker News community—where an MMO Asteroids “prototype” would eventually make the front page—it all turned out to be fake. April Fools.

[…] Vikrum Nijjar, however, took that as a challenge. He believed it could be done. And as luck would have it, he had been developing just the software needed to make it a reality

[…] His MMO Asteroids prototype made the Hacker News front page too. And this time, it was actually real

I’ve been dreaming of large scale real-time interactive games for a long time. This piece breaks down the events that led to the MMO Asteroids project and also looks at the underlying technology and where we might be headed in terms of true, large scale real-time interactions on the web.

My god the future is exciting.