2013·The social era·funny
Cookie Clicker
The joke about compulsive play that accidentally invented a genre.
You might remember it as idle cookie game
An early online video
This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
You click a large cookie and get one cookie. You buy a grandmother who bakes cookies while you are not clicking. You buy farms, mines, factories, portals, time machines. The numbers grow exponentially and the tone curdles: the grandmothers become something else, and the game arrives, straight-faced, at cosmic horror. Julien Thiennot, a French programmer posting as Orteil, coded the first version in one night in August 2013.
It first appeared in 2013, during the social era.
It was written as satire of free-to-play compulsion loops and was immediately played sincerely by millions, which is the joke completing itself. It is the game that gave the incremental or idle genre its name and its shape, and "cookie clicker" became shorthand for any experience that is all progression and no play.
Thiennot has kept updating it for over a decade. A Steam release in 2021 put a game you can play free in a browser near the top of the paid charts, and the genre it defined now spans thousands of mobile titles.
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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- You click a large cookie and get one cookie. You buy a grandmother who bakes cookies while you are not clicking. You buy farms, mines, factories, portals, time machines. The numbers grow exponentially and the tone curdles: the grandmothers become something else, and the game arrives, straight-faced, at cosmic horror. Julien Thiennot, a French programmer posting as Orteil, coded the first version in one night in August 2013.