Gleemax

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Magic: The Gathering	Gleemax

Gleemax was a social networking website launched in October 2007 by Wizards of the Coast. Despite grand intentions as a social hub for online gaming, it consisted primarily of a set of staff blogs, a number of online board games, and a poorly-received re-skin of the Wizards of the Coast's existing forums. The site closed in October 2008.

History

Origins

The name Gleemax originated as a long-running Magic: The Gathering in-joke, referring to a sentient brain in a jar said to run Wizards of the Coast's Research & Development department. Gleemax appeared as a Magic card in 2004 in the Unhinged set.

During 2006, Randy Buehler, Wizards of the Coast's Vice President of Digital Gaming, was a supporter of the company's digital initiative, a plan to develop online subscription-based service. Online versions of board games under Wizards of the Coast's IP were included in this plan from its earliest stages. As a proof of concept, Wizards hired a company called Game Table Online to produce an online playable version of Wizards' card game Guillotine.

Wizards' Digital Initiative intended to focus on the niche of gamers who preferred substance over style; the company believed that despite the rise in popularity of video games, many had high graphical technology but lacked innovative gameplay. Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, controlled many IPs which focused on technical complexity of play, including D&D, Magic: The Gathering, and Avalon Hill board games. The goal of Gleemax was to establish a web presence which would attract this niche of gamer at a single location.

According to Peter Adkison, the name Gleemax was a working title for an internal project, and was not originally intended to be used for the final project.

Announcement and launch

The web domain gleemax.com was registered on January 24, 2007. From May 25, bizarre articles began appearing at the site, including a kind of ARG that involved submitting photographs. By May 31, Wizards established a Gleemax™ forum at its existing forums site, Wizards.Community.

The establishment of Gleemax came shortly after the April 19, 2007 announcement to discontinue Dragon and Dungeon magazines, leading some in the community to incorrectly speculate that the quirky Gleemax would be the popular magazines' replacement.

On June 11, 2007, Wizards formally announced Gleemax.com as a social media site for gamers. The site was intended to feature news, blogs, friends lists, game reviews, local events calendars, and a digital distitbution platform for PC games. Phase one, previewing at GenCon in August 2007, would feature community tools, profiles, and editorial content, with further features added late 2007 and early 2008. An advisory board would also be recruited.

On June 18, Wizards of the Coast Vice President of Digital Gaming, Randy Buehler, announced the members of Gleemax's Advisory Board. The initial members were Slashdot co-founder CmdrTaco, Google manager Chris DiBona, Gamasutra publisher Simon Carless, GAMA director Anthony Calella, Top8Magic owner Brian David-Marshall, and D&D 3rd edition lead designer Monte Cook. Two additional seats were hired to winners of a quiz called the Ultimate Gamer Test, which ran from June 22 to 23. Over 1,500 people entered, of which 50 were selected to the next round and tasked with creating a three minute video to pitch a game to new players. From this group, five winners were flown to Gen Con, with the top two awarded seats on the Advisory Board, and the top winner also receiving $1,000 of Wizards of the Coast products.

On June 25, Buehler announced that Gleemax would incorporate a board game portal powered by Metagame, a technology platform by a company called Game Table Online. The intent was to offer online playable versions of Wizards of the Coast board games. On July 2, Buehler announced user profile pages similar to those on social networking sites like MySpace, with specialized features such as blog templates for tournament reports, profile tabs for showing off showing off characters, and deck building tools for card games. The site would also offer a Single Sign-On for all Wizards of the Coast digital products.A digital version of Robo Rally was also announced for a board game portal.

On July 9, the site announced a daily one-turn per day game called Uncivilized: The Goblin Game. The site also held a weekly podcast called Gamer Radio Zer0, by Gamer Zer0, which released episodes on Thursdays.

On October 10, 2007, Gleemax's launch was announced.

Activity and development

On May 4, GleemaxGames was launched, with a number of games available, all of which were free for a trial period. The initially available games were RoboRally, Axis & Allies, Vegas Showdown, Desktop Tower Defense, Guillotine, Acquire, and Magic: The Gathering Online.

On February 8, 2008, Gleemax announced the finalists in "The Gleemie" Awards, offering cash prizes of $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000 for the top three entries.

Closure

On July 28, 2008, Randy Buehler of Wizards of the Coast announced the decision to shut down the site in September. An official announcement was made on October 1, 2008. Wizards described their reasoning as moving resources to D&D Insider and Magic Online III. The Wizards of the Coast forums and staff blogs would continue to exist.

Postmortem

Gleemax was broadly considered a complete failure. In a 2024 retrospective, Andy Collins described the cause as a fundamental lack of technical competence at Wizards of the Coast, compounded by overconfidence. "We bit off more than we could chew... It turns out card game designers are not computer game designers, and we didn't have the chops as a computer game company. We didn't know how to hire the right people."

Rob Heinsoo described that the Gleemax team was staffed by programmers from multiple branches of the company who worked separately from each other and in different programming languages, under the mistaken understanding that it would be easy to have them combine their work at the end. Outside contractors brought in as advisors would quit within days due to the impossibility of the project working as intended.

Reception and influence

In a Dungeons & Dragons context, Gleemax was superceded by D&D Insider, Wizards of the Coast's D&D subscription service.