Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson revealed a new game for browsers over the weekend. It's a typing-speed-test game called Drop, and it works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
As far as typing games go, Drop isn't particularly complex. Just type the letters as they're highlighted. Hitting the wrong key causes the swirling mess of letters to speed up, and if you don't touch the correct key quickly enough, it's game over.
The surrounding elements — thudding electronic music and a swirling, expanding cube in the background — are mostly there to distract you.
Notch joked on Twitter that Drop was inspired by the super-fast mobile game Super Hexagon, the ending of the indie game Fez, and the corner of a ceiling.
The Super Hexagon comparison is perhaps the most apt. Just like that game, Drop is about learning and memorizing separate chunks of a puzzle and then automatically applying what you know as those chunks are presented to you in random order. In Super Hexagon, the chunks are deadly, spinning sections of walls; in Drop the chunks are words. The game re-uses a few key words like "eternal" and "journey," and if you memorize them, surviving becomes much easier.
Drop is not the first tiny experimental game released by Persson in the wake of Minecraft. In 2011 he released a 2D spin-off of his own Minecraft, called Minicraft, and he has participated multiple times in a contest to produce complete games using only 4 kilobytes of memory.
