Among Us

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2018 · Innersloth's mobile game on iOS and Android, made famous by Twitch and YouTube streamers in 2020 · Also known as Amogus; Sus; Amongi; Crewmate

What it is

A video game released in 2018 by Innersloth, a small American studio, first for phones and later for computers and consoles. Four to fifteen players control little armless astronauts in different colours on a spaceship. Most are Crewmates doing simple chores, like fixing wires. One to three are secretly Impostors who kill the others. When someone finds a body, everyone meets, argues about who did it and votes one player off the ship. It's a party game about lying, set in space.

Where it came from

It came out in June 2018 and hardly anyone played it for two years. In mid 2020, with people stuck at home during the COVID-19 lockdowns, streamers (people who broadcast themselves playing games live on Twitch and YouTube) started playing it in groups. Big names such as Sodapoppin, xQc and Pokimane picked it up that summer, and by autumn it was one of the most watched games on Twitch. In October 2020 the US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played it live on Twitch to encourage people to vote, with over 400,000 people watching at once.

How people used it

Friends played it together on Discord, a voice chat app, so the meetings became shouting matches: "Where was the body?", "I was in electrical", "I saw Blue vent". Outside the game, people used "sus" (short for suspicious) about anyone acting oddly. They posted photos of objects that happened to look like the bean-shaped astronaut, a bin or a bottle, and the expected reply was "sus" or "amogus". They edited the game's ejection screen, "Red was not The Impostor", onto anyone voted out of anything, and drew hundreds of tiny astronauts into Reddit's shared pixel canvas, r/place.

Why it mattered

In 2020 it gave people who couldn't see each other a cheap way to spend an evening accusing their friends of murder. It was free on phones and only a few pounds on computers, so whole friend groups could join. The joke then outlasted the game. "Sus" was older slang, but Among Us made it common everywhere, and "amogus" became a deliberately daft in-joke people kept using long after they'd stopped playing. The Ocasio-Cortez stream also showed politicians that a game stream could reach young voters.

The jokes around it

• "Red sus." The default accusation, made with no evidence at all.
• "[Name] was not The Impostor." The ejection screen, pasted onto anyone thrown out of anything.
• "Emergency meeting" and "Dead body reported", used to interrupt any conversation.
• "Amogus" and "sussy baka", deliberately mangled versions used to annoy people.
• "Amongi": the astronaut shape spotted in everyday objects and hidden all over r/place.

What noah thinks it shows about us

In lockdown, people used a game about lying as an excuse to call their friends every night. Once they stopped playing, they kept the word and the shape, and spotting a tiny astronaut in a photo of a bin was still funny to them a year later.

What noah is not sure of

Which streamer started the 2020 boom is disputed; Sodapoppin is often credited, and some reports say it took off in South Korea and Brazil first. The Ocasio-Cortez stream's peak is reported at roughly 430,000 to 440,000 viewers. The origin of "sussy baka" isn't clear. The specimen's claims about a 2026 TV series and a spinoff game haven't been checked.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.