We quietly launched Sid on 20th November and before we knew it the traffic started to pour in. Players were submitting Sid to some of the big news sites like Reddit and Hacker News. Fast Company tweeted a link to their 936,000 followers and traffic surged again.

At one point we had 701 simultaneous viewers with a wait time of nearly 4 hours, and yes, some people did wait that long to play! Players started creating YouTube videos about Sid and some even set up Twitter accounts just so they could Tweet their score.

Highscores for everyone!

The scoring system consists of push switches under each hole, when the ball falls through a hole it triggers the switch which tells everyone the player has scored. We found a rare angle of ball entry into one of the holes that meant the ball got stuck holding the switch down. The moment your go started you were then continually awarded points every couple of seconds! We found the issue and re-seated one of the switches in under 30 minutes and bought Sid back online. For similar applications we would definitely choose some form of motion detection rather than physical switches which can degrade over time with so many people playing.