by Jamie Danielle Logan
Among Us was always destined to succeed. First released on iOS and Android devices in June of 2018, the online multiplayer game became available on Windows for cross-platform play later that year. It was not the first of its kind. Far from it. The social deduction game takes direct cues from 2014 successes One Night Ultimate Werewolf, a boardgame, and Town of Salem, a fellow online multiplayer. Each of these games requires a large party to deduce who among them seeks the group’s downfall. The imposter is an innovative spin on previous threats—werewolves and mafia members—and there’s never been a dearth of interest in straightforward online multiplayers that bring together groups of friends and strangers; however, these are honestly the least interesting reasons for the game’s meteoric rise.
Let’s look at the numbers. According to Steam’s charts, although the game had very little name recognition, it was in the green——i.e., increasing in player participation——for the vast majority of 2018 and 2019. The first real drop came in late 2019, after Among Us had spent nearly two years on the market, when peak players went from nearly seven hundred down to one hundred and ninety-two. If it weren’t for what happened next, Among Us might have continued this way, garnering some attention but never enough to become a household name. In 2020, everything changed.
Play in the pandemic was different. It was necessary. Homebound in forced isolation, the global population logged into games long since forgotten. Online play became a much-needed social interaction, and people spent hundreds of hours on YouTube and Twitch watching Let’s Plays from experienced gamers and celebrities with nothing else to do. Popular streamers like Pokimane lifted the game from obscurity. Others, including but in no way limited to Corpse Husband, Disguised Toast, Sykkuno, and 5up, likewise devoted much of the year to streaming Among Us. Their work brought notice to the game, and the game did the same for them. Among Us exploded. By September 2020, over four hundred and thirty-eight thousand people were on the server at a single time. The server was not ready, because no one anticipated that this particular game would monopolize so many corners of the internet.
Online games in general saw an uptick in participation during the “socially distant” year of 2020, but Among Us remains unique because it existed in the same form for years before ever gaining prominence. The rapid increase in participation can be directly linked to the pandemic, but it still begs the question: Why Among Us? Why not Civilization VI or Raft or something else entirely? Well, there’s the obvious: Civ is much too complicated to hold the attention of the masses in times of extreme anxiety. Among Us, meanwhile, is simple. It’s familiar. It’s also relatively short in terms of gameplay and customizable to boot. Interested parties can log in with a preselected group of friends. Or, if friends are busy, players can log into any number of games to get their fix. Participants are online at all hours of the day, and the learning curve is limited and actually part of the fun. Different strategies yield different results when used on different groups of crewmates, and there’s no lost progress if someone bungles a round.
Perhaps most notably, it’s a game for non-gamers. Unlike Civ’s complicated path to victory and Raft’s requirement of some small amount of gamer instincts, Among Us requires no prior knowledge of game controls. You are a small, blob-like astronaut, running around a spaceship, trying to complete simple tasks. One of the tasks literally requires the swipe of a card. This can be surprisingly difficult depending on the game’s mood from day to day, but it requires no greater understanding than actually swiping a card does. Among Us is accessible in a way that most popular games are not.
It also differs from its predecessor Town of Salem in that it is a Steam game, meaning that unlike general internet games, once paid for, the code is available to anyone who wants it. For the techies and gamers, this means that Among Us can be modified as players see fit. There are mods that incorporate roles from Town of Salem, making the game more complicated for those easily bored. Ultimately, Among Us appeals to avid gamers and those who have never played a day in their lives. The fact that it already existed for two years at such an affordable price seemed only a bonus. Some players were already familiar with the mechanics and saw exciting new uses for it, such as the creation of a proximity chat mod.
The game is far from perfect. Anyone who has played during the pandemic will report constant glitches. There was the periodic appearance of a stranger in your waiting room, someone who had stumbled in by typing codes at random. There was also the fact that the game sometimes refused to accept you at all, regardless of what code you typed. But people played it anyway. Because it was—and still is—affordable, simple, widely available, unique, and interesting. The animation doesn’t hurt either. The crewmates’ colorful spacesuit aesthetic is endearing and just customizable enough to make players feel distinct—if you want them to, that is. And the concept of a spaceship, of intrigue and betrayal, in a place removed from viral infections and global climate change and politicians no one even likes? Well, perhaps that is the biggest draw. The game became so popular that one politician—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—leveraged the platform to garner attention, leaving politics behind for a moment in an attempt to increase visibility. And it kind of worked. Her three-and-a-half-hour stream at the time ranked third highest in views in Twitch history, with four hundred and thirty-nine thousand people watching at its peak. The whole thing was surprisingly wholesome because Among Us fosters an environment of drama, but it does so under the constraints of clear rules and human connection. It gives everyone a goal, a goal that pushes most towards unity while still allowing freedom, fun, and even deceit.
The game continues to do well (albeit not as well as it did when our lives were on hold) because Among Us was always going to succeed. Only, now it has begun to thrive. Over the past few months, the creators at InnerSloth have updated servers, added the game to the Nintendo Switch, and even released new maps. Somehow, it took an international pandemic and a crowd of clever players to see the game’s true potential.