What the heck is Agario?

This unassuming browser game topped Google's search charts in 2015

"Have you heard of Agar.io?"

I look up from my dinner menu to see my friend Chez watching me, expectant. Chez (not his real name) is a PhD student working on his dissertation, a film historian, and a freaking College Jeopardy champion, for crying out loud. If a name like "Agar.io" comes across his dash, it's probably because it came up while he was researching stumpers for a pub quiz.

"You are the third person to mention that game to me this month," I sigh, setting my menu down.

Agar.io is a web game, played chiefly in-browser and on mobile devices. It was voted through Steam Greenlight in May of last year as well, so we should expect to see it reach Valve's storefront eventually, though in the meantime you can play one of any countless number of clones. The game is as straightforward as they come: you play a dot, which wanders around a grid eating smaller dots. Eat more dots, and your dot gets bigger. Eat enough dots, you can even start to eat other players' dots. That's basically it.

Oh, there're a few more things at play than just that, obviously. You can split your dots back into smaller dots, and your dots can display images of Doge or Donald Trump or whatever. You have a display name, and the company assures me there's an internal moderation team stamping out naughty language or whatever, but in my time playing I ran across blobs named "Allahu Ackbar!" and another with a crude ASCII representation of a pair of breasts, so. Well. Maybe they're working on it.

"We knew it had the potential to be very popular, but we couldn't have anticipated to what extent," Sergio Varanda tells me. Varanda serves as Chief Product Officer of Miniclip, the publisher handling Agar.io's extension onto mobile. He credits popular Youtube personalities such as Felix Kjellberg (better known as PewDiePie) with launching the game into its current success. "This is the beauty of the internet -- a browser game made by one person can be the most googled game of the entire year, higher than Fallout 4, FIFA, and the rest."

That's true, incidentally, and that's how my friend Chez came to hear about it (no one guessed this one on his pub quiz, by the way). According to Google's own analytics, Agar.io was the top trending search for videogames in 2015, ahead of any major studio game or indie darling. Its browser edition currently ranks within the top 1,000 most visited websites as well.

So what is the appeal of Agar.io? Well, if you remember that weird cup and ball VR game from Star Trek: The Next Generation, it's a lot like that: simple, easy to grasp, yet deceptively difficult to get to do what you want it to do. The browser version seems to lose track of my mouse movement a lot and the controls on mobile are... well, let's just say I haven't run across anything else like them. If you're able to build up a certain level of skill with it, however, it can be pretty satisfying, growing a sprawling empire of blobs to swallow everything in your path. One time I got eaten by a massive vortex of red circles simply called "TEXAS."

"It became a real cultural cornerstone among Youtubers," says Varanda. "We have [players creating] cartoons and machinima about Agar.io. I think it's a testament to how universal the appeal of the game is."

That's one interpretation. Or it could be that, like in that Star Trek episode, it stimulates the brain's pleasure centers as a kind of mind control. You never know. Realistically, though, Agar.io likely succeeds because it reduces the actions of online games down to their simplest possible form: you drop in, you destroy the amorphous representation of a person you will never meet, and carry on until someone else does the same to you.

If you're interested in further reading about Agar.io, Motherboard has a nice feature on it, including some (brief) quotes from the game's original developer, a young Brazilian man named Matheus Valadares. (Though the Motherboard article states Valadares now works with Miniclip, a representative I spoke with said it was "not possible" for me to speak with him.) And hey, if a pub quiz ever asks you what the top trending game of 2015 was, now you know the answer.

 


Kris Ligman is the News Editor for ZAM. They still need to finish watching Deep Space 9.

Tags: News

Comments

Free account required to post

You must log in or create an account to post messages.