There’s buzz aplenty across the interwebs with the launch of this new Mozilla game experiment: BrowserQuest.
Summarised by Paul Rouget as “a tribute to classic video games with a multiplayer twist”, it certainly lives up to expectation. Made by French agency Little Workshop, this game oozes attention to detail!
The world contains a number of visually distinct areas, each with an appropriate backing track and, of course, new set of baddies to bash. An achievement system helps prod the player along, with armour and weapon upgrades rewarded as one progresses.
Canvas, Websockets, Local storage, Web workers, HTML5 Audio and CSS work in harmony to deliver this extremely fun (if quite easily mastered) homage to Zelda-esque RPGs, and multiplayer to boot! You can check out the source code for yourself on github.
Behind the scenes sits node.js, with players balanced across a number of servers. At the time of writing, according to the server dashboard, there are around 1700 fearless warriors hammering three servers with no noticeable lag 
I experienced only one bug where it was impossible to return from an area of the map, but a simple browser refresh found me back amongst the fray, with zero progress loss.
There’s more to say, but I’ll not spoil the fun – go play it!
BrowserQuest – a massively multiplayer game experiment
Write-up/accompanying post
Server load-balancing dashboard
Source Code