How did Slack’s failure as a video game company impact its product?

Slack was born out of a failed video game company called Tiny Glitch. The team worked on Tiny Glitch for three years before scrapping it.

During this time, they had built an internal communication tool built around an open source protocol called IRC.

This internal communication tool was the inspiration for Slack. The team wrote Slack from scratch, but their DNA as a video game company is still present.

Keith Adams, the chief architect of Slack, gave a great talk called “How Slack Works”. Below is a screenshot from that clip. You can view the full clip here.