Among Us

• 1. Introduction

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  Among Us, an online deduction game from the American studio Innersloth, arrived in June 2018 to an audience of roughly 30 to 50 players online at any one time. In late September 2020, the same game peaked at 3.8 million concurrent players. Between those two numbers lies a story about stubbornness, a lot of luck, and a very strange year. What did a small team do while almost nobody was watching? Why did they refuse to quit? And how did a game about spotting a liar on a spaceship end up shaping internet slang, political streams, and even an auction for a piece of fast food?

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• 2. Mafia in Space

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  Marcus Bromander, a co-founder of Innersloth, had played the party game Mafia since he was a kid, and it was his idea that started Among Us. In the live version, players were dealt cards and wandered aimlessly around a house. One of them secretly picked off the others, signaling each kill by drawing a finger across the neck. The team kept most of those mechanics. What they wanted to avoid was building an interesting house and leaving players drifting through a dull setting. A second inspiration was the science fiction horror film The Thing. Space became the stage, and the team added tasks, which programmer Forest Willard said changed several times during development.

  Work began in November 2017. The plan was a mobile-only game for local multiplayer, with just one map. Bromander set aside Innersloth's other project, The Henry Stickmin Collection, to build that first map, The Skeld. Early versions kept the ship in constant crisis and let Impostors do tasks. The team found that setup stressful. It left little room for detective work or thoughtful conversation during meetings.

  Willard described playtesting as painful and frustrating. Sessions kept breaking down, and he had to send fresh builds to testers through Google Play. The team tried the game with eight friends. They never tested it with nine players or with the maximum of ten. The game was built in the Unity engine.

  Sound was an early casualty. The original version had no audio at all, so that noises could not reveal hidden information when everyone played in the same room. When the Steam release came, Willard assembled the sound effects himself by mixing clips from many different sound packs.

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• 3. Anatomy of a Round

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  Every round of Among Us begins with a secret. Between four and fifteen people play, and up to three of them, depending on the player count and the host's choice, are randomly picked to be Impostors. Everyone appears as a colorful cartoon astronaut with no arms, so the Impostors look exactly like the Crewmates they hunt. Crewmates win by finishing every assigned task or by voting out all the Impostors. Impostors win by killing or ejecting enough Crewmates that both sides are equal in number. They can also win by sabotaging a critical system that the Crewmates fail to repair in time.

  Tasks are small minigames, puzzles and toggles, mostly chores like fixing wires or downloading data. Impostors cannot complete them, so they pretend. Their sabotages range from switching off the lights, which narrows what Crewmates can see, to disabling the oxygen generator, which demands an immediate response before anyone dies. Impostors can also slip into ventilation ducts, an act known as venting, and kill nearby Crewmates.

  Each map offers some evidence. The Skeld has security cameras, MIRA HQ has a door log with sensors, and Polus has a vitals display showing who is alive. Some visual tasks, such as scanning yourself in the medbay on The Skeld, play an animation that proves the player is no Impostor.

  Meetings begin when a player reports a body or presses the Emergency Meeting button. Players argue through the in-game text chat or an outside voice app such as Discord. Impostors lie or accuse the innocent. Seeing a kill is almost conclusive, but in most cases players must weigh each other's word. Whoever gets the most votes, if a plurality exists, is ejected.

  Before a game, hosts can tune the movement speed, the number of emergency meetings, the number of tasks, and whether an ejected player's role is revealed. Players can also dress up with skins, hats, visors and pets, and some of those are sold as microtransactions. The dead are not fully out of the game. Ghosts keep doing tasks or sabotages, pass through walls, and can chat only with other ghosts.

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• 4. Slow Burn

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  The listing for Among Us on Android and iOS in June 2018 carried the internal AppID "spacemafia", and almost no one noticed it. Bromander blamed the poor start on Innersloth being, in his words, really bad at marketing. The team nearly abandoned the project several times. What kept them going was a small but vocal player base. For that audience they added online multiplayer, new tasks and customization options.

  The Steam version followed on the 16th of November 2018, with cross-platform play from the start. A second map, MIRA HQ, arrived on the 8th of August 2019. It was a tightly packed headquarters about the size of The Skeld. Polus, a research station, followed on the 12th of November 2019. Both maps first cost money through in-app purchase. Prices were cut on the 6th of January 2020, and both became free on the 11th of June 2020. The map packs remain on sale, but now they only provide the skins bundled with them.

  Willard later admitted that the team stuck with the game much longer than they probably should have from a pure business standpoint. Updates came as often as once a week, and the player base steadily snowballed. Bromander credited the studio's savings for this. Innersloth could keep working on the game even though it was not selling especially well.

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• 5. The 2020 Surge

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  In July 2020, according to Willard, the Twitch streamer Sodapoppin was the first to popularize Among Us on that platform. Content creators in South Korea and Brazil had already helped drive an early rise. Bromander says the game is more popular in Mexico, Brazil and South Korea than in the United States. Other big names followed Sodapoppin, including xQc, Pokimane, Shroud, Ninja, MrBeast, Disguised Toast and PewDiePie.

  Commentators offered several explanations. The COVID-19 pandemic was the most common, since the game let people socialize at a distance. Emma Kent of Eurogamer thought the release of The Henry Stickmin Collection helped build awareness. Wes Fenlon of PC Gamer credited the streamer SR_Kaif with priming the game for its big moment. Fenlon also argued that Among Us was an entirely new take on Mafia, while Town of Salem and Werewolves Within mostly put the Werewolf rules online. M.J. Lewis of Wired grouped Among Us with Fall Guys and the Jackbox Party Packs as experiences without a story that helped players avoid the "cultural trauma" of the pandemic.

  The numbers kept climbing. YouTube reported that videos about the game were viewed 4 billion times in September 2020. TikTok videos related to it passed 13 billion views in October. The YouTuber CG5 wrote a song called "Show Yourself" that drew more than 60 million views in four months. Downloads passed 100 million in September, and concurrent players reached 1.5 million, nearly 400 thousand of them on Steam.

  The servers buckled under the load. Willard said the game was running on "a totally free Amazon server, and it was terrible." He had to fix the problems quickly, under crunch conditions.

  In October 2020, U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar streamed the game with Pokimane, Hasan Piker and other streamers, urging viewers to vote in the 2020 presidential election. Almost 700,000 people watched at once on Twitch.

  That same month a hacker calling himself Eris Loris began targeting mainly North American servers. Players reported lobbies flooded with chat spam promoting his YouTube channel and Discord server, along with political messages. A person claiming to be him told Eurogamer, in a report dated the 23rd of October 2020, that he built the bot in six hours and recruited up to 50 volunteers to form a botnet. He claimed the attacks hit 4.9 million players in 1.5 million games and were a publicity stunt to push votes for Donald Trump. Innersloth added an in-game warning on the 22nd of October and promised an emergency server update. It told players to stick to private games until then. At the end of January 2021, players reported that Eris Loris was back, this time distributing cheats.

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• 6. Rebuilding Mid-Flight

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  On the 23rd of September 2020, Innersloth announced that it had abandoned Among Us 2, a sequel in development since August. Meanwhile Willard and Amy Liu had kept patching the original. They raised its capacity, added four servers across three regions, and lengthened the multiplayer codes so more games could run at once. The team judged the old codebase outdated and unable to support so much new material, so they chose to rework the core code instead. They promised to tackle server problems, widespread cheating, and a system for banning disruptive players.

  In mid-February 2021, a feature called Quickchat replaced typed messages with a menu of preset phrases. Players under 13 must use it, while older players may choose Free Chat. An accounts system arrived alongside the next big update. Players could report anyone breaking Innersloth's Code of Conduct, with punishments from temporary to permanent bans. Humans, not bots, review those reports. Free Chat and custom nicknames require an account, and children under 13 need a parent's permission to make one.

  The Airship map had been announced at The Game Awards 2020 and launched on the 31st of March 2021. It has several floors and is based on the Toppat Clan Airship from the Henry Stickmin series. Innersloth made it free for everyone, and the face of Game Awards presenter Geoff Keighley became a skin. On the 15th of June 2021, the game's third anniversary, a new meeting screen, a design refresh and six new colors arrived, including one called Rose.

  The 9th of November 2021 brought the biggest change to the rules. Four roles were introduced: Shapeshifter, Engineer, Scientist and Guardian Angel. Engineers can use vents in a limited way. Scientists can check vitals from anywhere on the map. The ghost of the first Crewmate to die can become a Guardian Angel and briefly protect the living. Shapeshifters, on the Impostor side, can temporarily morph into other players. The same update added achievements, a level system, controller support, and cosmetic bundles called Cosmicubes.

  A Hide and Seek mode was announced at The Game Awards on the 8th of December 2022 and released the next day. It has no meetings or ejections. A single Impostor, whose identity the Crewmates know, tries to kill everyone before a countdown ends, while Crewmates hide or finish tasks to shorten the clock. The fifth map, The Fungle, a mushroom jungle, followed on the 24th of October 2023.

  In June 2024 came Noisemakers and Trackers for Crewmates and Phantoms, who can briefly turn invisible, for Impostors. In September 2025, the Detective joined the Crewmates, able to open case files on murders and question where players were. The Impostors gained the Viper, who can dissolve bodies and leave no evidence at all.

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• 7. Memes and Crossovers

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  In August 2020, Innersloth opened an online store for Among Us merchandise, and fans were already producing songs, fan art and memes. Willard said fan creations were the best part of making the game, and Bromander called them his favorite thing to see. The slang word sus, meaning suspicious, existed before the game but spread widely because of it. Sussy, sussy baka and amogus, a mocking misspelling of the title, followed. Another meme, Among Us everywhere, finds the Crewmate shape in unlikely objects. Merriam-Webster added sus to its dictionary in September 2022.

  In May 2021, an eBay seller named Tav listed a Chicken McNugget from the BTS Meal because it looked like a Crewmate. The idea echoed a 2017 auction of a Cheeto resembling the gorilla Harambe. Tav expected only a modest price. Two days after the listing, a bidding war began, and an anonymous buyer won. Tav added Szechuan sauce after a comment from Xbox on social media. In 2022, Guinness World Records recognized the sale as the most expensive chicken nugget sold at online auction. That October the Chilean chicken brand Super Pollo partnered with Innersloth to launch a Crewmate-shaped nugget into the Earth's thermosphere.

  Fall Guys was the first game to collaborate with Among Us, adding Among Us skins. Fortnite was a tenser story. In December 2020, a community-made mode called The Spy Within borrowed the formula, with ten players, tasks to earn coins, and two saboteurs. In August 2021, Epic released an official limited mode called Impostors, set in an underground bunker laid out like an Among Us map. Innersloth was frustrated that it received no credit. Bromander asked: "Is it really that hard to put 10% more effort into putting your own spin on it though?" Studio representative Callum Underwood added that Innersloth was open to collaborations: "Just ask and if you follow some basic rules it's usually fine." Epic credited Innersloth in an October 2021 blog posting, and on the 17th of June 2022 the two companies announced a Fortnite collaboration.

  The Crewmate has since turned up elsewhere. It became a playable character in Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble in January 2025 and replaced the King, Queen and Jack of Hearts in a Balatro skin. Among Us has also received cosmetics themed on Halo, Ratchet & Clank, Scream and Arcane. Posters for the film Free Guy used Among Us imagery, and characters play the game in the 2022 film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

  An animated series from CBS Studios is in the works under Owen Dennis, creator of Infinity Train. Randall Park voices Red, Yvette Nicole Brown voices Orange, Elijah Wood voices Green, and Ashley Johnson voices Purple. The first trailer premiered at Summer Game Fest on the 7th of June 2024. Production finished by October of that year, but the series has no distributor yet.

  Researchers have used it too. A simplified variation called Hidden Agenda appears in work on multi-agent reinforcement learning. It shows that artificial intelligence agents can learn social behaviors, including partnering and voting, without any natural language to communicate.

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• 8. Reception and Reach

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  On Metacritic, the PC version scored 85 out of 100 from nine critic reviews, and the Nintendo Switch version scored 79 from nine. Both fell in the range labeled generally favorable. Craig Pearson of Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Elliott Osange of Bonus Stage agreed that playing an Impostor is more fun than playing a Crewmate. Pearson called the Crewmate role exhausting. Alice O'Conner, also of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, described the game as Mafia or Werewolf but with minigames. Andrew Penney of TheGamer wrote that who you play with decides how fun it is.

  Leana Hafer of IGN predicted that Among Us would not be the last game of its kind to make a splash, noting its influence on Fortnite. She still faulted it for technical problems and for lacking any penalty for players who rage-quit. The French reviewer Tiraxa of Jeuxvideo.com missed built-in voice chat and found public servers less entertaining than private games with friends. Osange called the ads and cosmetic purchases on mobile nonsense.

  The Switch version drew its own complaints. William Antonelli of Insider found the gamepad awkward for many tasks and the letter-selecting chat slow. He considered it inferior to the PC and mobile versions. That port came out on the 15th of December 2020, the same day it was announced at an Indie World showcase, and PlayEveryWare co-developed it. An exploit let players reach the Airship before its official release, and a first update fixed it two days later.

  Console versions for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S followed on the 14th of December 2021, with the Xbox edition also joining Xbox Game Pass. Chat had been the obstacle, because standard text and voice seemed ill-suited to consoles. PlayStation players received Ratchet & Clank cosmetics, and Xbox players received a Master Chief skin. A separate game, Among Us VR, was announced at The Game Awards 2021 and released on the 10th of November 2022 for Meta Quest 2 and Windows. Schell Games, Innersloth and Robot Teddy co-developed it, and it is played in first person.

  The sales figures are enormous. Steam Spy estimated more than 10 million owners on Steam. The Associated Press reported the game was the most downloaded iOS app in October 2020. SuperData Research counted roughly 500 million players, 97% of them on free mobile. Yet the buy-to-play PC version, with just 3% of players, generated 64% of gross revenue. The Switch launch sold 3.2 million digital units in December 2020. When Epic Games Store gave the game away for a week in May 2021, daily players leapt from around 350,000 to over 2 million, and at least 15 million copies were claimed.

  Those sales let Innersloth start a publishing label, Outersloth, revealed in 2024 at Summer Game Fest. It invests in other indie games and recoups its money from their sales. Innersloth set it in motion after seeing a game called Mars First Logistics.

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