ViralWorld

Cookie Clicker

You might remember it as idle cookie game

The archive has not found a surviving copy.

2013·The social era·funny

The joke about compulsive play that accidentally invented a genre.

At a glanceThe facts

Remembered as
idle cookie game
Spread in
2013
Began as
Something you played
Where it started
web
Made by
Julien Thiennot
Era
The social era
Origin
Not an upload originally
Available
Not held by ViralWorld

What this wasThe story

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 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.

Why it is here: it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later · the upload that made its maker known

This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.

Where it came fromWhat we know

There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.

Created by Julien Thiennot. Established by research, not by who posted the copy shown here.

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