The tiniest MMO

At its peak, around 12 million people subscribed to World of Warcraft so that they could explore the realm of Azeroth together. The audience for PointlessQuest is quite a bit smaller. On launch day, the game hit a peak of 15 concurrent players… and no, that sentence isn’t missing a word. Then again, basically everything about PointlessQuest is intentionally tiny. It’s a game that was developed as a side project by designer Gareth Williams, and it’s available on just about the least likely platform to house an MMO: the Playdate. Yet it has garnered a small group of hardcore players who are working together to burn through the early game experience. “The support from the community has been and continues to be amazing,” Williams tells me.

Despite its small scale, PointlessQuest has many of the hallmarks of an MMO. There are characters that give you quests, a fantasy landscape filled with monsters, and lots of loot and experience to gather. Your early tasks involve slaying slime balls and collecting chicken eggs, and if you play long enough you can unlock a bow and arrow. But things are also simplified for the platform. The world is rendered in black-and-white pixel art, and battles happen automatically when you bump up against an enemy. The game does support in-game communication — including both text and voice chat — but I’ve yet to actually see someone online at the same time as me to test it out.

Williams is no stranger to the Playdate. He previously released the old-school dungeon crawler Legend of Etad and the 3D space shooter Tau on the handheld, and he says that they “were wildly successful in the context of the Playdate.” But the origin of PointlessQuest actually predates Panic’s little yellow gizmo. Back in 2008, Williams started developing the concept as a web-based multiplayer game that was only ever played by a small group of friends. “Then it was forgotten about,” he explains, “saved only to a ‘projects’ backup folder that has moved with me across USB sticks, cloud storage, and various PCs over the intervening years.”

Years later, when he learned that the Playdate software development kit was getting networking capabilities, Williams decided to resurrect the idea as an experiment. He says that he had no idea if it would even work, so he utilized Claude to generate a “modernized” version of the codebase, which he says took a few hours. From there, he went about redesigning the game, doing everything from introducing maps and quest dialogue to creating pixel art. He notes that, while the codebase is largely LLM-generated, “all of the game content is 100 percent made by hand.” The final product took around six weeks to complete, and he estimates it would have taken at least a year if it was hand-coded. “Basically, PQ would not exist without Claude,” Williams says. “Whether that is a good thing or not, I leave to the community to decide.”

So far PointlessQuest has been a modest success. Williams says that more than 400 players have made a character and earned at least a single experience point, and the pay-what-you-want donation structure has earned enough to fund the game’s servers “indefinitely.” More than sheer numbers, though, Williams says he has been elated with the sense of community the game has garnered. “I’ve heard tales of epic group boss fights, fan art on Reddit (I commissioned the new title screen and logo from a player that has made a bunch of cartoons), to a potential poetry reading session in the game’s village library,” he says. “It’s been a blast so far.” The community has a wholesomeness to it that’s on clear display in this Reddit thread.

In fact, hardcore players burned through the game’s early content so quickly that Williams had to release an expansion — called “The Armpit of the World” — soon after launch that gave them more to do after level 10. A second expansion is currently in the works, aimed at those who hit the level 20 mark. The future of the game beyond that depends both on Williams’ ability to keep updating PointlessQuest alongside his day job and how the community continues to develop. He’s hoping to eventually get the game on Panic’s Catalog shop, which does currently accept games with AI-assisted code, to ensure the future of the tiny MMO is just a little bit bigger. “A Catalog release would vastly expand the player base and give me and the existing players even more reason to keep coming back,” he explains.