Among Us rose to the top of the indie game food chain seemingly overnight during the final weeks of summer 2020. The murder-mystery title's simplicity and social gameplay struck a chord with hundreds of millions of people during a year when the coronavirus pandemic made in-person activities impossible. The stars seemed to have suddenly aligned to make Among Us the hit it is today, but for its original three-person development team at InnerSloth, it's been years in the making.

The indie game was first released on mobile platforms on June 15, 2018, and laid dormant until one of Twitch's most influential live streamers, Chance "Sodapoppin" Morris, began playing Among Us in July 2020. Since its meteoric rise to stardom, InnerSloth has made two new hires to help handle its newfound fame. However, the game that enchanted Twitch viewers in the summer was created by Marcus Bromander, Forest Willard, and Amy Liu.

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Bromander told Nintendo he was the first to conceive of the idea for Among Us, being inspired by party game Mafia and sci-fi horror movie The Thing. By then, Bromander had already become a well-known animator and game designer on content-sharing site Newgrounds. Tens of thousands of users followed Henry Stickmin, the series of interactive animated shorts he began in 2008 under the moniker PuffballsUnited. He even published The Henry Stickmin Collection as a Steam game through InnerSloth, but Among Us wouldn't begin taking shape until Bromander, Willard, and Liu joined forces.

Who Among Us' Developers Are

Who Created Among Us InnerSloth Team

The trio attended Oregon State University together and founded InnerSloth in 2015, following their graduation. Willard was the studio's sole programmer, while Bromander and Liu tag-teamed art and animation, with Liu handling promotional tasks, like social media posts. Their first release was Dig2China in 2015, a mobile game where players need to burrow their way to China by upgrading a drill vehicle. Then came DeiTied in 2016, a two to four-player party game, which never quite took off but paved the way for the 2018 launch of Among Us.

InnerSloth's space-themed title had humble beginnings. It was originally intended to be mobile-only and to only support local multiplayer with a single map. Among Us launched with no audio, but Willard later scrapped together some sound effects to give it more life. The game crawled after launch due to InnerSloth's lack of a solid marketing strategy. Still, it gained a small yet vocal audience that kept the trio from abandoning the game several times, InnerSloth told The Escapist.

Nowadays, Among Us has been crowned indie game royalty and has a thriving player base creating Among Us mods and video content for Twitch and YouTube. It was a slow burn to translate Bromander's idea into something playable, but it has now become bigger than InnerSloth ever imagined it could be.

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