Cookie Clicker

Cookie Clicker
Cookie Clicker's game interface
Designer(s)	Julien Thiennot
Programmer(s)	Julien Thiennot
Release	10 August 2013
Genre(s)	incremental
Mode(s)	Single-player

Cookie Clicker is a 2013 JavaScript-based incremental game created by French programmer Julien Thiennot. The aim of the game is to bake cookies at as great a rate as possible; as such, there is no true end to the gameplay. To start the game, the player bakes cookies solely by clicking on a giant cookie, gaining one cookie each time it is clicked. Cookies are used as currency to buy items like grandmas and farms that bake cookies without user input and upgrades that increase the number of cookies per click and unit time.

At first, the player clicks on the cookie on the left side of the screen to earn one cookie per click. With these cookies, the player can purchase objects, such as grandmas, farms, cursors, portals and time machines, that automatically make cookies at an improvable rate. Golden cookies, smaller cookies that appear and fade away over several seconds, appear periodically and grant bonus cookies or increase the rate of production for a short time. The player may also purchase upgrades to increase the number of cookies produced per second or per click. For the most part, cost scales with cookies-per-second; JavaScript add-ons are frequently used to choose the most efficient purchase at any given time. Achievements can be earned by completing various tasks, such as producing certain numbers of total cookies.

Because of the game's relatively simple code, cheats and add-ons are widely available and simply implemented by using browser consoles and bookmarklets.

Julien "Orteil" Thiennot created the game Cookie Clicker in August 2013. Featuring similar mechanics and objectives to the previous games, Cow Clicker, it also included new gameplay features. The game was first posted on 4chan's /v/ board on 8 August 2013 and later spread through social media sites. By 18 August 2013, Orteil had announced that his game had been receiving an average of 200,000 players per day.

In an IGN article, Cookie Clicker is credited as one of the few games to have played a major role in the establishment of the genre of idle gaming.

This genre involves games that orient the player with a trivial task, such as clicking a cookie; and as the game progresses, the player is gradually rewarded certain upgrades for completing said task. In all, these games require very little involvement from the player, and in most cases they play themselves; hence the use of the word "idle". This process of rewarding a simple action, or positive reinforcement, is what causes idle games to be commonly known as “super addictive”. The design is such that, with each reward, the player feels a sense of pride as if they have accomplished something important, thus creating the urge to continue to play.