Century Skills INNOVATION LIBRARY
21st
CHERRY LAKE PUBLISHING ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN by Josh Gregory
Among Us:
Beginners Guide
UNOFFICIAL
GUIDES
Published in the United States of America by Cherry Lake Publishing
Ann Arbor, Michigan
www.cherrylakepublishing.com
Reading Adviser: Beth Walker Gambro, MS, Ed., Reading Consultant, Yorkville, IL
Photo Credits: Jarretera/Shutterstock, cover and page 1
Copyright 2022 by Cherry Lake Publishing Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Cherry Lake Press is an imprint of Cherry Lake Publishing Group
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been filed and is available
at catalog.loc.gov
Cherry Lake Publishing Group would like to acknowledge the work of the Part-
nership for 21st Century Learning, a Network of Battelle for Kids. Please visit
http://www.batelleforkids.org/networks/p21 for more information.
Printed in the United States of America
Corporate Graphics
ISBN 9781534196438 (ebook)
ISBN 9781534190597 (pdf)
Century Skills INNOVATION LIBRARY
Chapter 1 A Streaming Success Story 4
Chapter 2
Jumping In
Chapter 3
Trust and Teamwork
Chapter 4
Stop Looking Sus
Glossary 30
Find Out More 31
Index 32
About the Author 32
21st
Contents
GUIDES UNOFFICIAL
A Streaming
Success Story
Chapter 1
Among Us may not have the fanciest graphics
compared to other games, but it is just as fun to
play.
O
ne of the biggest hit video games of 2020 wasnt
created by a well-known company. It didnt
have a big budget and it wasnt part of a famous
series. In fact, it wasnt even a new release!
AMONG US: Beginners Guide
Back in June 2018, a small team of developers
called Innersloth released a game called Among Us on
the iOS and Android app stores. Innersloth had only
worked on a couple of games before. Few people took
notice of their latest release. At any given moment, you
could find only a handful of people in the entire world
who were playing the game online.
The idea for Among Us was based on social
deduction games such as Werewolf and Mafia . People
have played these kinds of games in person for
decades. Typically, a group of players works to figure
out which of the other players are secretly enemies.
The enemy players must lie and keep the rest of
the players from discovering them. There are social
deduction board games, card games, and even video
games. When they started designing Among Us , the
developers at Innersloth originally planned for their
version to be an in-person game played using mobile
devices. However, they eventually realized that it could
work just as well when played online.
Even though Among Us wasnt a smash hit right
away, Innersloth kept working on it. They knew the
basic idea of the game was good. They just needed
a way to get the word out. With a team of just three
people and little extra money, they didnt have many
resources to rely on. And even though its possible
for unknown people to gain fame and influence using
social media, succeeding this way is often easier
said than done. Were really bad at marketing ,
Innersloths Marcus Bromander said in a 2020 inter-
view. Many game developers work with professional
marketers to advertise their creations. But for a
team as small as Innersloth, that simply wasnt an
option.
The goal of Among Us is to nd the Impostors in a
group of players. Voting out the wrong player can
make it harder to win, so be careful!
AMONG US: Beginners Guide
Innersloth continued doing what they know how
to do best: working on games. Little by little, they
added new features and fixed bugs in Among Us . In
November 2018, they released a PC version of the
game on Steam. They hoped this would help Among
Us catch on with a wider audience. Every so often,
Innersloth would notice a boost in the numbers.
We stuck with Among Us a lot longer than we prob -
ably should have from a pure business standpoint,
Innersloths Forest Willard said in an interview in 2020.
We tried to quit and should have quit several times.
Eventually they reached a point where a few thou -
sand players might be online at any moment. Thanks
to a couple of successful streamers, the game found an
audience in places such as Brazil and South Korea. I
feel like every time we saw big waves of players, that
pushed us to get excited and want to do more with it,
Bromander said. The team put in long hours to improve
the game. They created new levels and made the game
run more smoothly. But by the start of 2020, they were
almost ready to move on and try starting a new project.
In July 2020, two full years after Among Us was first
released, everything changed almost overnight. That
GUIDES UNOFFICIAL
month, an extremely popular Twitch streamer called
Sodapoppin began going live with Among Us . Millions
of viewers followed Sodapoppins channel, and they
all got to see how fun Among Us could be. It was a bet-
ter advertisement than the team at Innersloth could
ever have created on their own.
Over the following couple of months, Among Us
rocketed to the top of the Twitch charts. Some of the
most popular streamers on the service joined in,
Levels such as MIRA HQ were not available in the
