First look: These days, a major online game is one where 100 strangers can land on the same map at the same time. Jono, a free-to-play platformer that quietly landed on Steam earlier this month, goes in the complete opposite direction: there’s exactly one playable character for the entire planet, and anyone who downloads it has to wait in line for their turn.
Jono is the work of Tuomas Erikoinen, the artist behind the original Angry Birds, who now develops games himself as Part Time Monkey. When it’s finally your turn in the game, you have exactly one minute to steer the little pixel art hero past spikes, breakers, ice and portals. Once you’re done, control passes to the next person in line, right where you left off.
Failure is cheap, as dying only sends Jono back to the beginning of the current room rather than undoing anyone’s progress. However, every death leaves behind a tombstone, so the most difficult rooms gradually fill with markers that show the next player exactly where they are not allowed to jump.
Anyone stuck in the queue becomes an audience member, watching the current player via what is essentially a built-in livestream and cheering, heckling, or sending emotes in a shared chat. In a Reddit post, Erikoinen said the game draws people in, but he suspects it’s the chat that makes them stay. This could explain why over 540 players managed to send more than 85,000 messages in just 17 days.
One particularly dedicated player cleared over 7,500 rooms alone, which barely detracts from the community’s ultimate goal of one million unique rooms. Most of these come from a procedural generator, although Erikoinen also manually compares player-created levels with their creators’ iterations before sprinkling them into the road ahead.
Anything too gruesome for normal play is moved to an optional “Meat Grinder” mode, where one level claimed 2,627 deaths and took nearly five hours for anyone to beat.
With around 5,000 rooms cleared per day, Erikoinen estimates the volume will reach a million rooms around April, although he keeps everything waiting there for himself.
Oddly enough, the whole queue started as a defense against copycats. Erikoinen told GamesRadar that AI has made small games too easy to create. He’s already seen viral indie hits copied within hours of blowing up. A group of strangers who share the same personality are much harder to outwit.
In the last week or so, some indie studios have started keeping their games from the public before release, largely because AI-created clones keep popping up within days of an idea going viral. For example, Alliance Arts has stopped public demo for its horror drinking game Drunken Goddess Reflux and is now only running closed sessions.
