Our favorite internet game, manygolf, is exploding and we’re shepping nachas

My editor and I woke up one day last week to find something drastic had occurred to our favorite internet game, manygolf. We wrote about it back in June, but for months, this mostly obscure, multiplayer game you can play in a browser would consistently have just a few people playing at a time. Occasionally it was just me and my editor, locked in a fierce duel. And then, one day last week:

The sleepy confines of manygolf.club had exploded from two or three players to 20 and then 50 players. It was a whole new game. The manygolf of the June to August era, when my editor and I would set tee times to play against each other (for five dollars a game, I’m down $30, smh), was decidedly over. The Boing Boing story brought waves of new players and the game climbed the ranks of Reddit’s r/webgames.

Hi @BoingBoing players! Y'all are definitely pushing the limits of the server; hope you enjoy the game and sorry for any instability/lag

— manygolf (@manygolf) August 26, 2016

Manygolf is a multiplayer game that is kind of like mini golf but way more just like a computer game where you have to shoot a ball into a hole in a series of geometrical landscapes. Games last five minutes and after each hole, scores are apportioned and a leaderboard is built.
The game came to our attention in June, after creator Thomas Boyt shared it at the BrooklynJS meetup.

Yay @thomasABoyt is talking about using typescript to make video games at @brooklyn_js Play https://t.co/LwJG4aGVFr pic.twitter.com/Z3mQpQ72l9

— rachel (@ohhoe) June 17, 2016

At the time, we wrote that manygolf was, “Your favorite new internet game.” Boyt didn’t return our request for an interview then or now, but he did write about the experience in a blog post this week.
“With Manygolf, I was lucky enough to create a game that functioned as a huge experiment — the first project I’d ever built with TypeScript, and the first realtime multiplayer game I’d ever made — that also turned out fun,” he wrote.
And so he’s pushing ahead. The scoring system was modified to accommodate the added demand. Boyt is working on an iOS and Android app of the game, and has placed it on Steam Greenlight. And who knows? Sometimes when these games go viral, the creators can make a good chunk of change off them.