Among Us devs reveal they abandoned party game before viral success

Among Us has been one of the breakout hits of the last couple of years, but its devs have revealed a shocking detail that could have derailed the game’s success.

2020 will go down as one of the most bizarre years in recent memory, but something that benefitted from that period of time was Among Us – Innersloth’s detective multiplayer party game.

It became an absolute sensation on Twitch as pretty much every streamer seemed to be playing Among Us for hours on end.

However, Marcus Bromander, co-founder of the Innersloth development team, declared that the team actually abandoned the game completely before it blew up.

Among Us was nearly canceled

Bromander discussed the process for Among Us back in 2019 on Overcome’s ‘Visionaries’ podcast and explained how one of the game’s updates was supposed to be the final one.

“At the start of 2019, we had put out our third map and had done enough bug fixes, the game functioned and we were like “alright, that’s it, no more, time to work on something else. Then when Among Us took off again we were like we should ride the wave,” he said.

Bromander explained how instead of working on Among Us 2, he wanted to expand upon the original game by providing updates to flesh out the experience.

“One of the things we always did was when we were thinking of a feature that didn’t quite fit in so that we would save it for Among Us 2. So now with all these eyes, we started thinking ok, is it time to think about that again? I’m like, should we do Among Us 2? Or should we update the game that everyone is already playing? And that’s what we ended up settling with,” Bromander added.

It’s clear that the 2020 boom and surge in players and viewing figures gave Innersloth the confidence to put their new projects on hold and resume Among Us content – a decision that worked out very well.

It became an absolute sensation on Twitch and every man and his dog seemed to play Among Us. The game still boasts a ridiculous player count even now and there is even an official VR adaptation on the way.