Have you ever played the game Among Us? If so, you’re one of the nearly 100 million people around the world who have participated in one of the most popular games of 2020. It has had extreme success on the streaming platform Twitch, which has racked up millions of views on streamers playing the game. The game made it big on the Apple App store, ranking first place on the Top Free Charts. It has also made it big on one of the most popular social media platforms called TikTok with the hashtag Among Us racking up over 34.7 billion views.

The game Among Us was released in June 2018 by the US software company InnerSloth. In the beginning, the multiplayer game was looking like it was going to be a flop. When the game first launched it only had about 50 people playing every day. It wasn’t a big hit until recently during the pandemic when everyone around the world was staying at home and trying to find ways to enjoy their time inside. That was when millions of people started playing it. In the months of September and October, Among Us had around 60 million people playing it every day.

Because of its immense popularity, politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have chimed in on the game in order to raise awareness towards political issues. On October 20^th, she hosted a livestream to play the game with various popular streamers like Pokimane and Toast on her newly created Twitch Channel. Her stream was to encourage viewers to create a voting plan for the upcoming election. It was viewed over 5.63 million times. She recently did a live stream with other politicians like Ilhan Omar and Hasan with other popular streamers. That video has over 2.11 million views.

What is Among Us you ask? It’s a mystery multiplayer game that is set in space. It currently has three maps: The Skeld, Mira HQ and Polus. Games can start with as few as four people, or as many as ten. When the game starts, players are notified if they are a crewmate or an impostor. As a crewmate, your goal is to finish your tasks and get a group task win or figure out who the impostors are. If you get the role of the impostor, your goal is to kill off the crew. You can do that by sneaking through vents, closing doors and trapping victims etc. If a player reports a body or calls an emergency meeting, everyone will be put into a discussion and vote out who they think is the impostor.

All in all, it’s a fun and easy mystery game to play. I’ve been playing this nonstop with my friends and it’s so fun. A friend of mine, Daniel Pham, when asked about his thoughts on the game said  “Its great! Its very fun and uses strategy and quick thinking. It increases your ability of awareness because you need to be aware in order to catch the impostor but you also have to be aware when you are the impostor so that you make sure you don’t get caught with your own words.”

With its cancellation of an Among Us 2,which was supposed to be a whole new app, they decided to just work with the original and create an update which is rumored to have new maps and more costumes to wear on your among us character, I’m sure millions of people are just as excited as I am for it.