According to The New York Times, “Among Us” launched in 2018, and was described as an online murder mystery game, sort of like an online game of Mafia. A game full of deception, the game would feature several crewmates and imposters in a small map. The crewmates have to complete their tasks and find out who are the imposters, while the imposters would try to quietly murder all of the crewmates on the map. But like most indie games, it never gained any traction in popularity over the first two years it was out.

However, unlike most of those games, it would receive a second chance. During early quarantine this year, a streamer called Sodapoppin decided to give the game a go. He streamed the game to his 2.8 million followers. What his followers found was a nice little game. This would be the spark to light the fire.

As the game grew in popularity, some of the most popular people in the gaming media, like the popular YouTubers Pewdiepie and Dream, and streamers Ninja and Tfue would begin to start playing it. With the coverage on both major platforms YouTube and Twitch, and even coming to social media, all this media traction led to more players, and soon, “Among Us” would be full of them. People who wanted to be able to talk to people and socialize during the pandemic played the game in order to get to know people, talk to friends, or meet new ones.

Although, the story of “Among Us” isn’t all cut and dry. On Aug. 18, 2020, Innersloth confirmed their plans of making a sequel to the game. They said the reasoning behind this decision was how the original “Among Us” game was made. Innersloth simply stated “It really was not created to be this big. Because of this, it’s extremely hard to add more things without breaking existing things.” This announcement led to a huge growth in players larger than anything since the original spark of the game. According to Steam, the very same month, the amount of people playing increased by 788.86 percent. The next month, it again rose 708.66 percent, both numbers achieving great advancements in popularity that were never seen before in the game’s life. The announcement had sparked interest in this game.

But it wasn’t meant to be. On Sept. 24 of the same year, Innersloth made a new announcement, stating that Among Us 2 would never come to be. “We have decided to cancel Among Us 2 and instead put all our focus into improving Among Us 1. All of the content we had planned for Among Us 2 will instead go into Among Us 1.” The main reasoning for this decision being the hard transition that the game would have to go through. As previously stated by the “Among Us” devs, deciding which game would get what was a very tough decision. They wouldn’t want to copy and paste everything over from the first game but also didn’t want to leave anything out. They wanted for the first “Among Us” to still be a valid choice to play. Not only that, but they wouldn’t know if their sequel would even go anywhere. In the end it would just be easier and safer to continue work on what was already a success. While people were generally fine with the news, the growth that the announcement achieved would never be even closely achieved again. The month after the late September announcement, the percentage of people gained would stoop to a low 16.56 percent, and the month after would be the single biggest loss in players in the game’s history with the game losing around 35.20 percent of its player base.

I asked eighth grader Keshav Dubey what he thought about the recent outbreak of players in “Among Us.” Here’s what he said:

The Horizon Sun: Do you think that “Among Us” is a good alternative to meeting people?

Keshav Dubey: I think it’s a good way to see what someone’s like, since “Among Us” is all about making people “crack” if that makes sense.

The Sun: Do you believe that “Among Us” will last as a popular game or slow down and eventually decline?

KD: It’ll last, I think soon it’ll mainly just fall into another party game like Jackbox but I think it’ll still do well for the next few years.

The Sun: Why do you believe that the world fell in love with the game and are still playing it?KD: The game was basically dead on launch, with only a few people actually playing. Thing is, streamers playing this game bumped up the popularity a ton, and the simple design was probably what made it so appealing. It’s gotten a bit oversaturated, but I think it’s still in a good spot. I think it’s doing well because it’s just well-made, the design is great, and it’s definitely gonna be alive for a long time.