 It's already widely known that despite being the current flavour of the month, Among Us actually released in 2018. To hear some people tell it, this game languished in obscurity for two years before suddenly becoming an overnight sensation. This isn't strictly true. In reality, Among Us was popular long before English speakers discovered it, with huge player bases in countries such as Brazil and Korea. The game's current popularity is the result of an accidental slow burn, with the developers in a sloth repeatedly attempting to give up and move on to something else, only to be dragged back to add new features. According to lead programmer Forrest Willard, we're a slow-growing company. We snowball our way to the top instead of spike and tail like most steam releases do. We stuck with Among Us a lot longer than we probably should have from a pure business standpoint. We tried to quit, and should have quit, several times. Created by three friends, Forrest Willard, Marcus Bramander, and Amy Liu, Among Us was initially a very different game. It was envisioned as an offline-only game, to be played by friends in the same geographical area. The game was free, supported by ads, and was only available on mobile. The game felt like a bit of a risk at the time. Another similar game, Bombernauts, had recently released without taking the world by storm, and there was a danger that Among Us would prove to be little more than a waste of time. Said Willard, I initially didn't want to make Among Us because of the multiplayer aspects. We had seen stuff like Bombernauts flop, and the added complexity of multiplayer made it really unappealing. But our other game idea wasn't panning out, so I prototyped Among Us, and it was immediately fun and interesting. The team put out Among Us, and when it initially underperformed, they were ready to move on to their next project. But then, something unexpected happened. The game received feedback from players. Somewhere out there, someone was playing Among Us, and they had suggestions for making it better. Willard said, It didn't release super well, but we got a bunch of feedback. By which I mean any feedback, which was pretty great. Emboldened by a bit of player interaction, the team decided to improve the game a bit. They added online multiplayer and released the game on Steam. There, it did okay-ish, but the fanbase was still fairly small. Then, in December of 2018, everything changed. A Korean YouTuber named Kevin Choi made a video on the game, and suddenly, Among Us received an influx of a few thousand new players. The timing was… less than ideal. Success was a two-edged sword, said Willard. At the time, we were running off a totally free Amazon server, and it was terrible. Thousands was way too much, and so I think it was like the five days prior to Christmas. I was working like 14 hour days, and that was the actual crunch pressure, where I felt that I had to get this fixed. You release the game, and someone takes notice, and suddenly that's where your, like, 80 hour work weeks come in. Like, it's those intense bursts of, oh, something's happening! You must react quickly. You don't want to lose this moment. As exhausting as this was, it was only the beginning. A few months later, a Brazilian YouTuber, Godnaut, made a similar video, kicking off the game's popularity among Portuguese-speaking players. While the team added a few more cosmetic elements, they were eager to move on and try something new. Finally, at the start of 2020, they announced that work on the game was complete, and that they were moving on to something else. It was only a few months later that streamers including Kyfe, SodaPop and an XQC started playing the game on Twitch, and the English-speaking games community finally discovered something that large chunks of the rest of the world had known about for years. At this point, Inner Sloth decided to work on a sequel, in order to capitalise on the first game's success. Ultimately though, they decided to ditch this plan and continue adding to the original among us. Players simply won't let the team move on. The moral of the story here is obvious. Patience is a virtue. Overnight success doesn't really exist. It can often take years of work to make your dreams come true.