History of Multiplayer Piano

Overview

Multiplayer Piano (multiplayerpiano.com) is a website that allows users to play a virtual piano with others through the internet. It was published by Brandon Lockaby as a Google Chrome Experiment in 2012. Users can communicate through text-based chat, use physical MIDI devices to play music, and record their performances with a built in MP3 recording interface.

History

Creation

Multiplayer Piano was created and published by Brandon Lockaby in 2012 and offered a piano that could be played and heard by other users. Later on in development, numerous features were added including a text-based chat box, a synthesizer, a sound selector, the ability to record in MP3 format, and the ability to browse and create new rooms.

The website initially used socket.io to power its multiplayer component before switching to WebSockets for more flexibility.

Sale of Multiplayer Piano

On October 24, 2020, Lockaby sold Multiplayer Piano for 6,500 USD. In 2021, the new owner, under the alias of Jacored, opened an official Discord server featuring channels for article submissions, open-source code contributions and new logo ideas. Advertisements were added to Multiplayer Piano via AdInPlay, and large buttons were added to the corner including Contribute, Piano Blog and Join Official Discord 2021.

Structure

Upon visiting the site, the user is placed in a lobby. Lobbies are limited to 20 players. Once the limit is reached, a new lobby (lobbyN, where N represents the lobby number) is created. This process repeats as more users join. Outside of lobbies, users can browse a list of public rooms that have no player limit. Users can also create and privately share rooms hidden from the room list, otherwise leaving a one in a trillion chance that someone will join that same room id.

Community

Multiplayer Piano is home to a sizable community, notably attracting computer programmers and various web enthusiasts.

In January 2013, Vsauce3 uploaded a video to YouTube featuring Multiplayer Piano in its infancy, which caused a mass influx of users to join the site.

In June 2017, Multiplayer Piano was featured alongside other Google Chrome Experiments in a YouTube video published by popular French video creator Squeezie, resulting in an influx of French users on the website. A YouTube video by Vsauce spin-off D!NG featured the website in September 2017.

At its peak in 2020, the site had over 1500 frequent visitors over the course of a few days showing on its now-unreachable Google Analytics dashboard.