First look: These days, a big online game is one that can drop 100 strangers onto the same map at once. Jono, a free platformer that quietly landed on Steam earlier this month, goes in the opposite direction entirely: there’s exactly one playable character for the whole planet, and everyone who downloads it has to wait in line for a turn.
Jono is the work of Tuomas Erikoinen, the artist behind the original Angry Birds, who now makes games on his own as Part Time Monkey. In the game, when your turn finally comes up, you get exactly one minute to steer the tiny pixel-art hero past spikes, crushers, ice, and portals. Once done, the control passes to the next person in the queue, right where you left off.
Failure is cheap, since a death only sends Jono back to the start of the current room rather than wiping out anyone’s progress. Each death does leave a gravestone behind, though, so the trickiest rooms slowly fill up with markers showing the next player exactly where not to jump.
Everyone stuck in the queue becomes the audience, watching the current player through what is essentially a built-in livestream and cheering, heckling, or spamming emotes in a shared chat. In a Reddit post, Erikoinen said the game is what draws people in, but he suspects the chat is what makes them stay. That might explain how over 540 players managed to send more than 85,000 messages in just 17 days.
One especially devoted player has cleared over 7,500 rooms alone, which barely dents the community’s real goal of one million unique rooms. Most of them come from a procedural generator, although Erikoinen also checks player-made levels by hand against their creators’ replays before sprinkling them into the road ahead.
Anything too cruel for regular play gets shunted into an optional “Meat Grinder” mode, where one level took 2,627 deaths and almost five hours before anybody beat it.
Clearing around 5,000 rooms a day, the crowd should reach room one million around April by Erikoinen’s estimate, though he’s keeping whatever waits there to himself.
Oddly enough, the whole queue began as a defense against copycats. Erikoinen told GamesRadar that AI has made small games seem too easy to make. He’s already watched viral indie hits get copied within hours of blowing up. A crowd of strangers sharing one character is a lot harder to rip off.
Over the past week or so, a few indie studios have started keeping their games away from the public before launch, mostly because AI-built clones keep popping up within days of an idea going viral. For instance, Alliance Arts dropped the public demo for its horror drinking game Drunken Goddess Reflux and is only running closed sessions now.
