From Progress Quest to Universal Paperclip: The History of (free) incremental games
The genre of incremental game is very unique in the history of videogame: theses games require little to no player interaction, are often as visually attractive as a spreadsheet, most of the time never really end, and yet are highly addictive. In opposition with idle games, they are characterised by its constantly evolving nature, introducing new mechanics over a period of days, or even months.
Born on the Internet, spearheaded by indie developers before becoming a very recognizable formula (and an easy cash grab for mobile games studios), the genre has a rich history full of gems, most of them free and made by a single developer. I wanted to explore this history by focusing on a few games, each showing an original take on the concept.
Progress Quest (2002)
Often quoted as the first incremental games ever, Progress Quest doesn’t have much in common with modern takes on the genre. In fact, it challenges our conception of what makes a game, because the player almost never interacts with it: Once your character is created, you cannot make a single input. The interface looks like a joyless accounting software with a bunch of numbers and loading bars, but it is actually a game. It is a parody of MMORPG of the time, but describes all the events your character encounters in the most boring utilitarian way. Your warrior meets a mysterious man, fights goblins or solves quests? A loading bar is slowly filling, and some numbers increase.
And yet, it is a fascinating and weirdly relaxing experience. You don’t have to follow the pace of the game, you can just sit back, let the game run in the background of your computer and check once in a while what happened to your character. Created by Eric Fredricksen as a downloadable game, it became a cult classic with a browser version and many Flash games directly inspired by it such as Idle RPG. And while the idling aspect of the game is its most defining attribute, it gave a nudge in a direction that many incremental games will take: the parody.
Cow Clicker (2010)
In the early 2010s, the popularity of idle games such as Farmville was skyrocketing thanks to the rise of Facebook and smartphones. These idle games are commonly not associated with incremental games, because they are from different genres (in the case of Farmville it is a simulation game), and the waiting mechanic is merely an hostile design choice to push the player to spend money. But, while they are not incremental games, Cow Clicker, its direct satire, clearly is. Following the steps of Progress Quest, this game is a biting parody of that particular trend of casual games. But unlike its predecessor, the player can actually interact: They can click on a cow once, and then wait for six hours before being able to click again.
Interestingly, Cow Clicker was never intended to be a real game. At first made for a conference as a means to illustrate a point, it became a surprise viral hit, receiving many updates and spin offs, each being their own critique of other social gaming trends, before culminating in an ARG putting a definitive end to the game, making all the cows disappear. The game is not playable anymore, and probably never will be again. The creator, Ian Bogost, often spoke about how the game was not fun to begin with, and it is clear it was always meant to be a satire more than an actual game. But its viral success will remain in the mind of many Internet users, always prompt to mock obvious cash grab disguised as social games.
Candybox (2013)
Rares are the games that kick off a genre. Even more rare are the games so influential they inspired two brilliant successors only a few months after its release. And the fact it was all a free browser game with no graphics at all made by a singular student developer makes it a one of a kind event. With no exaggeration, Candybox is a classic. Not only because it cemented the incremental genre with its most recognizable tropes, but also for how it achieved so much with so little. It is, at first, a blank HTML page with only a counter and two buttons. Each second you earn a candy, you can eat them or throw them on the ground. But new features are slowly added over time: A merchant sells you lollipops for your candies, then you can plant the lollipops in order to make a lollipop farm, and then you can buy a sword to go on adventure to retrieve even more candies. Each added feature adds a layer of complexity, and before you know it, it becomes an adventure game with crafting mechanics, spells and secret treasures. And still, you can eat candies or throw them on the ground.
Candybox is, in some sense, the first “real” incremental game, by that I mean it is a game with a gameplay that couldn’t be described with other usual terms. You can let it idle in the background of your computer, or you can fully immerse yourself in the world, finding objectives to reach, thinking strategies and how to invest your resources in order to get to your goal faster. Because in this game, there is no real game over, and the end goal can be reached either way, whether you play it intensely or you let it run and check it once in a while The real appeal to the game is not to win, but discovering what the next step is, and how things escalate into further absurdity.
Candybox still holds up very well, even though it was the first one in a genre that counts many classics. Its sequel introduced even more mechanics, a world map and even more complex encounters, but still using its iconic ASCII look. But the first one surprisingly still holds up because of its bold design choice, and its desire to surprise the player at every corner with a minimalistic look.
Cookie Clicker (2013)
Candybox is the father of the incremental genre, but it is safe to say that Cookie Clicker, released only a few months later, is by far the biggest and most influential, that surpassed every other in popularity, and is still being updated and even ported to Steam. This game, made also by a single student developer, took the tropes of Candybox and improved on them in many ways. It took the idea of self-replicating resources from the Lollipop farm, and pushed it front and center of the game. You have only one goal: produce cookies. You click, you get a cookie. Click more and you’ll get a bunch of cookies that you can trade for cursors that click for you, or grandmas that bake cookies for you. Soon, your bakery will produce one hundred cookies per second, then one thousand… There is absolutely no limit, you can produce so many cookies the numbers become meaningless. No city building mechanic, no adventure or RPG, all you have to do is produce cookies, buy cookie factories, cookie banks, cookie mines, cookie particle accelerators…. There is no end, only further goals to reach. When you think you can’t go further the game introduces new currencies to boost your production, or a hidden skill tree that incentives you to continue pushing to even greater heights.
Cookie Clicker has been discussed over and over. It seems like everyone with access to the internet played it, and it will be played until the end of time. It is easy to understand why, it is the incremental game to date with the most features, and yet the easiest to play. Most incremental games become so complex over time they need the full attention of the player. Cookie Clicker is very clever: it introduces many new mechanics and random events, but keeps them simple enough they can all be idling in the background. It is also important to notice that despite its popularity, it rejects any kind of monetisation except from small non intrusive ads. There are no microtransactions whatsoever, no pop up ads. This game is a giant Skinner box and yet the creator made the decision to not abuse it for profit. Which might be one of the reasons the game still evokes positive feelings despite being as addictive as a smartphone game.
A Dark Room (2013)
A Dark Room is the third installment in the informal “Incremental game debuts of 2013” (technically the game was released two months before Cookie Clicker but the article make more sense in that order). Like Candybox and Cookie Clicker, it is a game that starts very simply and then reveals itself over time, but instead of an absurd fantasy universe, the tone is very serious. Your character is alone in a dark, cold room. Outside the world is strange and scary, strange creatures roam the land, and many wanderers are looking for refuge. At first you can only light a fire to warm the place. The longer you stoke the fire, the more people gather around you, seeking refuge. The game is a fight against the hostility of the outside: You have to gather wood for the fire, build traps to catch something to eat, build shelter to help more wanderers. With enough people the dark room becomes a small village, and you have to assign them to several tasks in order to gather resources: wood, meat, fur, but also coal, iron and then steel. The game ramps up in complexity quite fast and forces you to think ahead in order to produce what you need. After a while, the game shifts into an RPG with a world map, where you have to wander into an hostile land, attacked by creatures and scavengers.
A Dark Room certainly was a success, but is often forgotten in the discussions on the incremental genre, on the contrary of Cookie Clicker. Maybe it is because the game is way less “hands off” than the others, and demands a lot of strategy and thinking ahead from the player. The RPG mechanics are surprisingly in depth, involving way more different resources than any other incremental game. They are also very difficult, often ending in game over, making you lose all your progress and your inventory. On the contrary of the games previously mentioned, A Dark Room is not a satire, not a critique of videogame trends. It is a very straightforward game with strong themes despite its very simple appearance. It is challenging, it demands a lot from the player, but still an ambitious title that experimented with many mechanics, pushing the genre in unexpected places at the time.
Kittens Game (2014)
When I was close to finishing this article it was only featuring six games. Then I learned about a title I never heard of, but which was pivotal to the history of incremental games because it was directly inspired by A Dark Room, and would inspire the next game in the article. So, let’s talk about Kittens Game.
This game is not a satire or parody of videogames. It is described as “ an exploration of how societies are structured” but the premise seems very silly: You start as a kitten in a forest, and your goal is to build a whole society. So far it is not so different from any other incremental games. You gather resources, you build constructions to help generate more resources, and so forth. On my first playthrough I made many catnip fields to generate catnip, the basic resource of the game, before building some huts to house new kittens. Suddently a message popped up saying “your catnip supply is too low” despite having not changed anything. I then realized that kittens consume catnips to survive, which I should have expected, but also it was winter and my catnip production plummeted, which makes sense if we think in real world logic, but is something I absolutely didn’t expected in an incremental game.
It made me realize it wasn’t a regular incremental game. It was also an in-depth simulation with many variables to account for. Building your society does not only mean creating buildings, but also developing science and agriculture, being wary of the happiness of your citizens, and also your impact on the environment. It is a game that asks the player a lot of attention, which can be the opposite of what incremental games are about, but it also proposes a unique challenge that can be very exciting to overcome. There are so many variables, so many things to account for, it is hard not to be impressed by the amount of content this game offers.
Despite being less known than the other discussed games, Kittens Game has a large community of players, dedicated wiki and subreddits, and got a lot of updates and even an iOs version. The interface is very much reminiscent of A Dark Room, but adds a lot of very helpful options, such as the time estimated before you can afford a new building, or the ability to toggle only buildings you can afford.
Universal Paperclip (2017)
A lot of the articles about idle and incremental games talk mostly about the previous titles I mentioned before focusing mainly on mobile games. In fact, most articles about incremental games were made until 2017, where by that point the genre was well established. But in the multitude of forgettable titles, one developer (with the help of several other peoples) decided to take the genre to its roots by making a free browser game with minimalistic graphics: Universal Paperclip.
Based on the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment, you play an artificial intelligence tasked to produce and sell paperclips. But it is not as simple as making cookies in Cookie Clicker. Now, not only is your goal to constantly grow your paperclip production, but also to balance the selling cost and the supply of raw material in order to avoid bankruptcy. The balance is very tricky to reach, and there are a lot of variables that forces you to constantly adjust your settings to reach the optimal configuration for the fastest revenue growth. All of this while buying upgrades and new features, like an investment engine, or quantum computing chips.
At least, this is the gameplay for the first few hours. Like any incremental game, there is a catch and the gameplay will evolve over time, but the originality of Universal Paperclip is that basic mechanics become automated over time and your goals will change, so will your tools to achieve it. I don’t want to say too much about the rest of the game but I think you can already guess where this is all leading up to. Except not quite, the game designed all its different ‘segments’ very cleverly in a way it constantly surprised the player, giving new twists to mechanics they took for granted.
