For five years, I’ve been keeping a secret.

Keeping a secret is always a little fun. You get to feel special. You get the satisfaction of knowing something interesting that other people don’t. In discovering the Next Big Thing while it’s still Next and not yet Big. But it’s not sustainable, because a bigger, better part of you wants to share it. The fun of a secret lies in knowing you’ll get to reveal it someday.

Today is that day.

A couple of years ago, I flew to Seattle to volunteer at the SpyParty booth for PAX West. Afterwards, I wrote an essay about the game and its community called Shaking the Hand of Someone You’ve Shot, in which I said the following:

“…this game of bite-sized espionage is too strange and refreshing to merely enjoy: it has to be shared.”

This idea is partly literal: SpyParty is a multiplayer game, after all. Every game is different, and every game is shared with someone else. It is, to use a word you’ll almost never see in video game writing, intimate. Does intimacy scale?

That’s the test, both for the game itself and the community: what happens when a close-knit group, where everyone knows each other, opens its doors to the rest of the world.

Today, SpyParty will be on Steam. We don’t know what happens next, we just know that it’s next. The secret is out. Tell everyone.

Join the party.