The game “Among Us” came to sudden popularity after two years of it being released. But why now? Many reasons could include people being quarantined at home full of boredom or overall just the game being genuinely fun.

Among Us is an online multiplayer video game released on June 15th, 2018, by the American game studio InnerSloth. 

Among Us is mostly described as being similar to the game of “Mafia” except it takes place in space. Each game can have up to 5-10 players. These players can be your friends or just people you meet in random lobbies.

 The overall premise of the game is one or two people in a game are randomly selected as ¨impostors¨ while the rest of the players are known as ¨crewmates.¨ Impostors essentially have to try to kill the crewmates without getting caught, while crewmates have to do miscellaneous tasks around the ship and have to try to figure out who the impostors are. 

The game started to gain popularity this fall due to famous Twitch Streamers and YouTubers playing together, and people posting about it all over TikTok. This resulted in a gain of 42 million downloads on Steam and 158 million installs across the app store and Google Play.

The game became such a big hit to the point where people started to express their passion for the game by creating fan art, Halloween costumes, and even creating the game in real life to play with their friends. There was even a point where two congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, live-streamed with popular streamers to promote voting for this upcoming election. 

But why are people so obsessed after two years of being released?

Makayla Price, a junior here at Agua Fria, as well as an active player of the game said, “I think Among Us is so popular right now because it’s a different type of game,” Price said. “There aren’t many games like Among Us.” 

She then said that she thinks being quarantined in a worldwide pandemic could have also helped with its popularity. “In the time you either stayed home and played video games, talked to your friends or did other things,”  Price said. 

Like most trends, there’s a downfall, where a trend suddenly disappears like it never happened. But what kind of downfall will Among Us have? Will it last a while and slowly become less popular, or will people move on to something pretty abruptly?

“I think the game is going to have a slow downfall due to the main reason that Among Us doesn’t have a large security system. It’s super easy for cheaters and hackers to get into servers and ruin the game,”  Price said. Price believes that people will get tired of Among Us quickly unless the game developers fix their security problems.

One of the biggest hacking issues so far was after October 21 when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez live-streamed the game, which ended up in someone hacking the system resulting in people being locked out of games, receiving spam of messages that were pro-Republican and endorsement for a YouTube channel called “Eris Loris.”

Due to this issue, InnerSloth said that they are going to be creating an emergency server update to help solve the problems but encourage players to play with people they know.

Whether you are playing Among Us due to boredom or another way to interact with your friends, the game is still growing and is gaining different ways for people to be able to play differently. Overall, this game becoming a trend has definitely brought people more joy than expected.