Nobody can think back to 2020 without thinking about Among Us. Whether you were playing it with friends while stuck at home or watching the most popular streamers in the world (and politicians) play it on Twitch, Among Us became one of the most popular games in the world.
That makes it all the more shocking that the creators behind Among Us almost pulled the plug on the game entirely at one point three years ago.
Among Us is an online multiplayer deduction game developed by Innersloth in 2018. But nobody really heard of the game or uttered the word “sus” until 2020. With people isolating and quarantining throughout 2020 and beyond, Among Us became a fun way to interact with friends, causing the game to blow up. By Nov. 2020, over 500 million people were trying to find out who the imposter was on their crew.
Innersloth co-founder Marcus Bromander recently chatted with Overcome, a podcast and news outlet, about the beginnings of the phenomenon. According to Bromander, the team was “basically done” with Among Us by the start of 2019.
Bromander explained to Overcome they’d put out the game’s third map and fixed a bunch of bugs and were ready to just work on something else entirely. Bromander had been working on a separate project the entire time and the team had begun prototyping other game ideas.
Then Among Us took off, soaring into pop-culture history.
“When Among Us took off again, we thought what should we do now? We have so many eyes on this. We should ride the wave,” Bromander recalled.
The incredible spike in players thanks to Among Us streams with Imane “Pokimane” Anys, Felix “xQc” Lengyel, and Rachell “Valkyrae” Hofstetter made the prospect of updating Among Us exciting once more. Bromander and his team decided to release a big update to the game instead of creating a sequel.
“I wanted to experience releasing updates to a lot of people like that. That was very exciting to me,” Bromander said.
Is Among Us still popular?
Since the explosion of Among Us streams and memes in 2020, Among Us’ popularity has died down quite a bit. The internet has a way of getting oversaturated with trends, with TikTok and Twitter getting flooded with ironic Among Us content daily. The game almost became a meme itself.
But Among Us still has a strong playerbase. It’s a simple game with easy mechanics that is fun to play with friends. Similar to a board game, Among Us offers the opportunity to work together or sabotage your team, making it a fun challenge for fans of the genre.
Right now, there are over 1 million people playing. The average Twitch viewership is around 5,000, however, a drop from its peak of over 770K viewers in Nov. 2020.
