Born in 2018, "Among Us" did not attract much attention in the early days of release, and by 2020, the game was almost a hit, becoming a favorite object of major live broadcasting platforms and anchors, almost setting an insurmountable benchmark for social stealth games. Until now, the game has remained hot across all platforms.
Among Us is a very easy-to-understand game, and unlike Fortnite, it's not a big game work product or the kind of game that tries to catch up with the trend, it was originally a mobile party game — the kind that invites a group of friends to the house to pass the time.
After an update, Among Us added an online multiplayer mode, during which game streamers around the world were playing the game live, and it became one of the largest games on the planet, arguably "taking over the world" and becoming the best way for friends to entertain, with 600 million downloads of The mobile game version of "Among Us" reached 600 million downloads worldwide as of April 2022, and there are still nearly 10 million monthly downloads.
Among US once ranked first among monthly active users of mobile games in Europe and the United States
However, the success of "Among Us" was not as easy as it seems now, in the early days of the game's development it was a prototype project that was almost abandoned, and the number of players was only about 100 people, and after two years of "dormancy", it "turned out" by chance. Recently, Innersloth, the development team of "Among Us", talked about the birth of "Among Us" in a documentary, showing the "first half of the life" of this late game.
The Birth of "Among Us": A Two-Man Team, a "Failed" Project
The story of Among Us begins with New Grounds, an entertainment site founded in 1995 that hosts user-generated content such as games, movies, audio, and artwork in four separate categories of websites. New Grounds has played a huge role in the history of indie games, as well as "a place where many animators and developers began to create and gain fans long before social media appeared", and its iconic tank icon became the best representation of childhood games.
In 2007, Marcus Bromander, co-founder of Among Us development team Innersloth, created his own account on New Grounds, when he created an animated mini-game called Crossing the Abyss, in which players need to help the protagonist cross the "abyss" formed by two blocks, but can only choose the 8 options given by the creator, each of which corresponds to a simple animation.
The game, or animation, was well received at the time, and Marcus Bromander was so excited that he began to put similar animated games on the site and try to add more elements to the game. Along the way, he met programmer Forest Willard, who was also one of The Co-Founders of Innersloth, and began working together on the Unity engine to make games.
The collaboration between the two can be said to complement each other, and they say that they have filled each other's gaps - one is good at art, the other is good at programming. Soon after, they released a game called Dig into China, which also received a lot of praise.
For some time they were actively testing prototypes and failed many titles, including a game called "Deitied", which was presented with Steam's "Greenlight" program at the time, and the two spent a long time researching and developing it, although the game seemed to have the meaning of "Among Us", but both developers thought it was lacking in fun.
Marcus and Forest began to "die" the game, and after a month of optimization and revamping, they still found the game uninteresting, so they were ready to spend another two weeks to continue the optimization, focusing on adding some new ideas, and even wanted to rename the game "Space Mafia". In the process, Among Us also gradually revealed the basis of this game.
One of the inspirations for "Among Us" came from John Carpenter's famous thriller film "The Thing", and the concept of "hiding yourself in the crowd" was born, and the development team joined another developer, Amy, who also planned to officially start a new game development under the name "Among Us". Amy was in charge of in-game task design, UI, and more that the two founders weren't good at.
They just had the idea of giving it a try, and they knew it wasn't an AAA blockbuster, so they developed it in the form of local multiplayer and mobile games. The game received a lot of buzz after its release, with many players saying they liked the game very much, but it would have been better if there was a multiplayer mode, which gave birth to today's "Among Us".
Among Us is associated with Assassin, a campus culture game popular among college students, and similar to table games such as Mafia, testing the player's deception, strategy, and impromptu reaction. The name "Space Mafia" is also derived from this board game, so that when you open the "Among Us" page on Google Play now, you can see the logo of "Space Mafia" on the URL.
Long optimization road, sell maps to monetize
As games begin to move from concept to physical, Innersloth is bound to address some of the ills of game design. For example, in order to allow players to do things while serving as a non-pretender class, Among Us adds a number of mission systems to each player, and the game is carried out by completing the task so that the hull remains inseparable. In the first few versions of the game, players almost "sweated" to complete different missions, and the huge tasks overwhelmed the player, but the result was that the player did not have time to see who was killed, or notice anything unusual.
Innersloth quickly became aware of the problem and saw this as a point of rearrangement, adding more elements such as "vents" that allowed the player to move quickly around the map, reduced the time it took the player to upload files, optimization of the quest requirements process, and so on. This makes missions more natural, and players can start different missions to their liking.
Among Us is very focused on the accessibility of the game, and their goal is to make a game that anyone can play, which is also the art style of the game's original style - similar to Flash games, suitable for mobile devices, and as simple as possible. Of course, the character style of the cartoon painting is equally interesting.
Forest says he's often asked how the game's character style is determined, and his response is often, "That's how I painted, that's my Style." But in fact, Forest also showed that he was not good at drawing on PS, but better at how to draw Flash characters, so the characters in "Among Us" would take on this kind of style.
As the popularity of "Among Us" continues to rise, more and more players from all over the world have joined in, and the influx of a large number of players has also brought hidden dangers to game servers, while the increase in the number of online users has also made developers feel the "trouble of happiness", they not only have to deal with server problems, but also add more new content.
In the second half of 2019, Youtube anchor "Godenot" aired a video related to "Among Us", the 2 million fans of the anchor also made "Among Us" more well-known, the number of games from the previous double digits rose to three digits, it was at this time that the development team decided to produce more new content - and of course, how to monetize.
The development team initially thought about making a new game map for public sale, and the player who purchased the map could create a room for other players to join, including new game skins, which is where MIRA came from. By the time the MIRA map was being made, the development team had already come up with the idea for PORUS.
MIRA's map design can be said to be a summary of previous game development experience, such as how to place blocking points, how to produce a lot of information, and so on. PLOUS, on the other hand, wants to be a truly open map with no blocking points, which is almost the opposite of MIRA.
Both maps arrived on schedule in 2019, the response from players was good, and the development team decided to move on, announcing that they would slowly make Among Us free and join the map's periodic free-to-play activities — as the development team was ready to start making another game.
I don't know if it is lucky or unfortunate, it is at the same time as the release of the news at the end of 2019, more and more anchors began to broadcast the game live, after which "Among Us" ushered in a bigger boom, the number of players grew from 40 to 60,000 in a few months, thanks to the "goods" of the major anchors in the live broadcasting platform Twitch. The developers themselves admit that the outbreak helped to explode Among Us.
The soaring "Among Us" left the development team in a kind of confusion, they were thinking about what to do next, and even considered developing "Among Us 2", but as the number of games soared, they dismissed the idea of making a new game and decided to continue to focus on the game. By October 2020, the number of games peaked, becoming one of the highest MAU games of all time.
Under the boom: grow the team and move forward steadily
Of course, new problems also began to arise, and after creating such a huge number of users, Among Us not only needed to think about how to retain these players, but also needed to expand the team - because there were still only three People in Innersloth at this time, and they were also surrounded by business giants, and everyone tried to get a piece of it.
Recruiting new members was a hassle for Marcus, who was very worried about how many people would fit; but Forest had long been planning ahead, and he wanted to make the game as perfect as possible, so he had been paying attention to the talent in the field of game development, in which he met Callum and began to know people from Switch and Xbox through his connections.
By this time, Among Us was already very popular, with news of them all over the world, and a large player community almost everywhere, which led to the arrival of Innersloth's "fourth person" - community director Victoria Tran. Victoria Tran herself is a big fan of Among Us, and after she joined, Among Us began to make a growing social media presence and run a true community of players.
The game mode of "Among Us" naturally makes countless games hungry, many social stealth games have begun to appear, and some games that have been more famous, such as "Fortnite", have also begun to add social stealth elements, and at the same time, more and more games are also linked with "Among Us".
Of course, a game that wants to run for a long time can't do without technical support, and Forest, which operates the technical aspects of "Among Us", has always wanted to fix some problems in the game, but it is a little weak, so Innersloth hired independent game developer Adril Wallick to repair the "crumbling" foundation of this fiery game.
Fixing Among Us isn't an easy task, and while the game isn't complicated, every move is seen by players around the world. Adriel's first issue was the in-game translation problem, because the languages of the previous game development process were "hard translations", which brought a lot of useless code, and cleaning this up also helped the game to be listed in the Epic Store faster.
In addition, Among Us has also been following the principles of making games accessible, such as adding more game decorations to make it easy for colorblind players to play, etc., and has also developed in terms of age verification and protection of minors.
Finally, one of the more questions Among Us has to face is the future — will It be a kid-me-goer to make Innersloth an AAA game studio or will it continue to be small workshop-like?
Founder Marcus said they wouldn't give up updates and developments as long as players played Among Us, and Adriel said they would continue to grow, but not greatly. The community director stressed that he prefers the indie game-like "chaos and madness", and Forest also said that it should move forward steadily.
It's unclear where Among Us will go in the future, but it's already breaking out of its "comfort zone," with the upcoming VR version of "Among Us" being a good example, with the game recently debuting on Meta's Gaming Showcase, and Meta's vice president Jason Rubin saying it "can definitely reach new heights in vr." The VR version of Among Us was a real challenge for Innersloth, and Marcus admitted that he and Forest didn't know any code or art about 3D games, so they hired others to implement the idea.
Still, for Innersloth, steady progress may be the best portrayal of them, as Marcus puts it, "we're not in a hurry."
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