Cookie Clicker: The Most Addictive Online Game You’ll Ever Play

Over three years ago, sketch web series SMBC Theater predicted that if you stripped an MMORPG down to its barest essentials, it would amount to little more than clicking a button to see a number go up. What’s more, it would be extremely addictive – fatally so.

Flash forward to August of this year, when 23-year old game maker Orteil put Cookie Clicker on the web. The gameplay is eerily similar to the hypothetical one outlined by SMBC Theater all those years ago, right down to just how addictive it is.

The premise is simple: you want to make some cookies. To do so, all you have to do is click on the giant cookie icon on the left of the screen. If you click on it, you get a cookie. If you click on it again, that’s a second cookie. Ten clicks? Well, that’s ten cookies.

Pretty basic stuff, and if that were all there was to it you’d probably stop by then. But wait, if you click fifteen times, that allows you to purchase an upgrade – an autoclicker that will produce a cookie for you every ten seconds. Not bad.

But that’s just the beginning – bake 100 cookies and you can purchase a grandma to help bake cookies for you. Get a few of those and you’ll be baking an extra five cookies a second. Things only escalate from there. Pretty soon you’ll be building cookie farms to help grow cookie plants, and before you know it you’ll be opening up portals to the Cookieverse and ushering in the Grandmatriarchs.

To play the game, just click the cookie above.

The whole thing plays like some sort of weird psychology experiment, but an extremely effective one. By having easily attainable tiers and unlockable items, it becomes very easy to tell yourself “just a few more clicks.” Fast forward to eight hours later and you’ve blown off hanging out with friends, because you’re thisclose to getting enough cookies to afford a cookie mine.

Give it a shot, but maybe on a day where you don’t have a lot of other commitments: these cookies are laced with something.

Play Cookie Clicker here (also available for android).

SMBC Theatre’s original sketch: