Agar.io

Agar.iois amassive multiplayer onlineaction gamecreated by Brazilian developer Matheus Valadares. Players control one or more circularcellsin a map representing aPetri dish. The goal is to gain as much mass as possible by eating cells and player cells smaller than the player's cell while avoiding larger ones which can eat the player's cells. Each player starts with one cell, but players can split a cell into two once it reaches a sufficient mass, allowing them to control multiple cells. The name comes from the substanceagar, used to culture bacteria.
The game was released to positive critical reception; critics particularly praised its simplicity, competition, and mechanics, while criticism targeted its repetitive gameplay. Largely due toword of mouthon social networks, it was a quick success, becoming one of the most popularbrowserandmobile gamesin its first year. The mobile version ofAgar.ioforiOSwas released on 8 July 2015 andAndroidon 7 July 2015 byMiniclip. The browser version was released in June 2015 byCrazyGames.Agar.iohas inspired similar web games called ".io games", including games with a similar objective but different characters, and games that incorporate elements of other genres likeshooter games.
The objective ofAgar.iois to grow a cell on aPetri dishby swallowing both randomly generated cells, known as "agar", which slightly increases a cell's mass, and other smaller cells (players), without being swallowed by even larger cells.The browser version currently holds five game modes: FFA (Free-For-All),Battle Royale, Teams, Experimental, and Party. The mobile version of the game includes Classic (like FFA), Rush Mode, Burst, and Battle Royale. The goal of the game is to obtain the largest cell; players must restart from a small cell when all their cells are eaten by larger players or fountain viruses. Players can change their cell's appearance with predefined words, phrases, symbols, or skins.The more mass a cell has, the more slowly it will move.Cells will gradually lose a small amount of mass over time.
Viruses are green, spiky circles that split cells that consume them into many smaller cells, rendering them vulnerable and attractive targets to other players. Players can hide under viruses if their cell is small enough and their name short enough. Viruses are normally randomly generated, but players can also cause viruses to split in two by "feeding" them mass—typically in the direction of another nearby cell which the player wants to consume. Consuming a virus will change your mass by +100 and red viruses change your mass by +200.
Red viruses look similar to regular ones, except for their color. They will consume/eat cells that have less than 200 mass, spitting out their mass equivalent in food/dots. When a green virus is fed to a red one, the red virus will consume it, spitting out the equivalent mass. Cells with mass greater than 200 can swallow the red virus, which achieves the same effect as a regular virus, but the player will be rewarded with 200 mass instead of the regular 100, red viruses only spawn in Experimental and Battle Royale mode.
In the experimental mode, feeding a virus will push it instead of englarging it, making it easier to split other players.
Players can split their cell evenly into two (if the starting mass is odd, the cells’ masses will differ slightly), to a limit of 16 cells at once. One of the two evenly divided cells will be shot in the direction of the cursor when the space bar was pressed. This can be used as a ranged attack to shoot a cell in order to swallow other smaller cells or to escape an attack and move quickly around the map.Split cells merge back into one cell if a bigger cell of the same player consumes it. Aside from feeding viruses, players can release a small fraction of their mass to feed other cells, an action commonly recognized as an intention to team with another player.
Agar.iowas created by nineteen-year-old Brazilian developer Matheus Valadares, written inJavaScriptandC++. Valadares shared anIP addressto the game forplaytestingon the4chanvideo game board /v/ and game development forums, before releasing it on the domainagar.ioon 28 April 2015. It is named afteragar, a substance used to growcell cultures.Valadares continued to experiment with adding new features—experimental mode was created specifically for this purpose.He thought about adding more complex biological features likephotosynthesisandmitochondria, but ultimately decided to strip the game down to its current simple mechanics. In-game advertisements covered server costs.
Valadares never marketedAgar.iooutside of his single post on 4chan, where he received feedback and users formed "cartels" to get on the in-game leaderboard.Its initial success is instead attributed to its popularity among online content creators such asYouTubersandTwitchstreamers. Only a week later, the YouTube channelVinesauceuploaded a gameplay video ofAgar.io. On 30 May,PewDiePie, a YouTuber who then had over 42 million subscribers, uploaded the first of nineAgar.iovideos and called it his "new favourite game". However, he stated in the video that his fans had been requesting anAgar.iovideo for a long period of time—it had already become popular viaword-of-mouthacross social media.DedicatedAgar.ioYouTubers saw their subscriber counts quickly rise.
Commentators also suggestedAgar.io's accessibility as a freebrowser game, as well as the addictiveness of its simple and intuitive mechanics, as reasons for its unexpected success.
In March 2016,Agar.iovideos reached two billion views on YouTube.Digital Trendssaid in 2021 thatAgar.iostill maintained an active core fanbase.
After meeting with him inLisbon, mobile game publisherMiniclipbegan working with Valadares at the end of April 2015. They were attracted byAgar.io's wide appeal; the game already had five million daily players and Miniclip executive producer Jamie Cason stated that their staff were all playing it within a week.Miniclip released mobile ports ofAgar.ioon theApp StoreandGoogle Playon July 8.It became the number one app on the App Store in the United States, United Kingdom and 32 other countries.
Agar.iowas praised for the addictive nature of its simple gameplay and graphics.PC Gamerincluded it on its list of the best browser games.
Engadgetdescribed the game as "a good abstraction of the fierce survival-of-the-fittest competition that you sometimes see on the microscopic level."TouchArcadepraised its simplicity, strategic element, and "personality".It was chosen bySFGATEas App of the Week in August 2015.Criticism was mainly targeted towards its repetitiveness and the controls of the mobile version. Tom Christiansen ofGamezebowas mixed on the game, saying that there was "nothing to hold my attention" and that it was "highly repetitive, overall".Pocket Gamer, reviewing the mobile version, described its controls as "floaty".
Game journalists also noticed that the ability to choose usernames and skins enabled players to declare their support forgeopoliticalcauses and figures in-game. Some even formed alliances with players supporting the same causes. Others adoptedinternet memesand online platforms as their skins, as well as offensive usernames.One reviewer jokingly recounted: "I've ... seen the Earth be swallowed by Pubes, Steam absorb EA, and France split in two and flee from Mars before being eaten by Your Mom's Ass (which was, quite frankly, enormous)."
In the weeks leading up to theJune 2015 Turkish general election,Kotakunoticed that players using names related to Turkish politics were prevalent and often cooperated against other political parties.An article in the journalGames and Cultureargued that the feature was the main reason forAgar.io's success. It noted thatAgar.ioprovided a platform for competing ideologies in a "survival of the fittest" simulation when they would instead be shut down on social media. In an effort to make the game more commercial, Miniclip improved moderation and removed theSwastikaandISISskins, a move which was described as furthering the game from its original 4chan audience—Valadares himself had refused to remove the Nazi skin onReddit.
Because it was frequently propagated through social media and broadcast onTwitchandYouTube,Agar.iowas a quick success. The agar.io website (for the browser version) was ranked byAlexaas one of the 1,000 most visited websitesand the mobile versions were downloaded more than ten million times during their first week,and 113 million times as of December 2016.During 2015,Agar.iowasGoogle's most searched video game.It was Google's second-most searched game in the United States in 2016.A 2015 press release byMiniclipstated thatAgar.iowas listed as the fifth top game on YouTube's list of top games.
Inspired byAgar.io's success, Steven Howse released the snake-themedSlither.ioin March 2016. The game soon reached the top 10 most downloaded apps on iOS and Android, buoyed by the similar word-of-mouth and attention from YouTubers that had propelledAgar.io. By June,Slither.iohad hit over sixty million daily players.It eclipsedAgar.io's popularity,pushing it to second place to become the most Googled game of 2016.
The rapid rise ofAgar.ioandSlither.ioled to the beginning of a new genre of browser games, dubbed ".io games" for thedomain namethey use. Characterized by simple graphics and gameplay in a free for all multiplayer arena, .io games received around 192 million visits in 2017.Many .ioshooterslaunched afterSlither.io—Valadares releasedDiep.ioin July 2016. Miniclip also began developing new .io games.