ONI Games · Published How a joke about role-playing games became one of the biggest genres on phones: Progress Quest, Cow Clicker, Cookie Clicker, the mobile boom and the idle games of 2026, with dates checked against sources.
Idle games started as jokes. The first one, Progress Quest (2002), mocked role-playing games by playing itself. Cow Clicker (2010) mocked social games by reducing them to a single click. Then in 2013 Cookie Clicker, written in one evening, reached 50,000 players within hours, and a genre was born. Since then idle games have moved from browsers to phones, where some have passed a hundred million installs.
Timeline in one line: Progress Quest 2002, Cow Clicker 2010, Candy Box!, A Dark Room and Cookie Clicker 2013, Clicker Heroes and AdVenture Capitalist 2014, the mobile idle boom from 2015, hero collectors from 2016, and hundreds of new idle games every year since.
2002: Progress Quest, the game that plays itself
Eric Fredricksen released Progress Quest in 2002 as a parody of EverQuest and other online role-playing games. You create a character, and from then on the game plays itself: progress bars fill, the character levels up and finds loot, all without you. It was a joke about how much of an RPG is just watching numbers go up, and it is usually called the first idle game.
2010: Cow Clicker, a satire of social games
In July 2010 the game designer Ian Bogost released Cow Clicker on Facebook. You clicked a cow, and then you had to wait six hours to click it again, unless you paid or asked friends. Bogost made it as a satire of the social games of the time and their mechanics of monetization and social pressure. Many people played it straight anyway, which says a lot about why the mechanics worked.
2013: the year incremental games took off
Three browser games in 2013 defined the genre:
- Candy Box! by aniwey (April 2013): an ASCII-art RPG that starts with a counter of candies and unfolds into an adventure. Candy Box 2 followed in October.
- A Dark Room by Michael Townsend (June 2013): a text game that begins with a fire in a cold room. Its iOS version by Amir Rajan reached the top of the App Store's games chart in April 2014.
- Cookie Clicker by Julien "Orteil" Thiennot (August 8, 2013): written in a single evening, it reached 50,000 players within hours and peaked at 1.5 million visits in a day that August.
Cookie Clicker turned the joke into a template: click, buy buildings that click for you, upgrade, and reset for heavenly chips. Wikipedia puts it simply: incremental games gained popularity in 2013 after its success.
2014 to 2015: prestige and offline earnings go mainstream
The next wave added the systems every idle game now has. Clicker Heroes by Playsaurus (August 2014 in the browser, August 2015 on phones) was an early pioneer of prestige on mobile. AdVenture Capitalist by Hyper Hippo (May 2014 in the browser, December 2014 on Android) popularized offline earnings: your businesses kept earning while the game was closed. Clicker Heroes reached Steam in May 2015, and both games are still on Google Play today.
2016 to 2019: the mobile idle boom
Phones turned out to be the perfect home for idle games: always with you, played in short sessions. The biggest idle games on Google Play today date from this period. Idle Miner Tycoon (June 2016) has since passed 100 million installs. Egg, Inc. (July 2016), Tap Titans 2 (December 2016) and Idle Heroes (2016) all have more than 10 million.
Hero collectors brought the idle loop to RPGs with gacha summoning, and AFK Arena made "AFK" a genre label. Meanwhile, the deep browser incrementals came to Android too: Kittens Game and Universal Paperclips in 2017, Antimatter Dimensions in 2019.
2018 to 2019: researchers take notice
Idle games became serious enough to study. In 2018 researchers analyzed 66 idle games for the CHI conference in "Playing to Wait: A Taxonomy of Idle Games", and Sonia Fizek described them as delegated play. In 2019 a team interviewed six idle game designers, including the makers of Progress Quest, Cow Clicker, Kittens Game, Tap Titans and Universal Paperclips. Their paper's title says how it all began: "It Started as a Joke".
2020 to 2023: the genre spreads everywhere
The early 2020s brought idle mechanics into every theme: Idle Slayer and Cell to Singularity (2020), IdleOn (2020), Legend of Slime (2022). Cookie Clicker itself arrived on Android in October 2020 and on Steam in September 2021, where it passed 60,000 concurrent players shortly after release. Melvor Idle turned RuneScape-style skilling into an idle game.
2024 to 2026: a crowded, still growing genre
Idle games are now one of the biggest casual genres on Android. In our study of 847 idle games on Google Play, more of today's idle games came out in 2024 (131) than in any other year, and 100 more had arrived by September 2026. Cookie Clicker reached PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch in May 2025. New hits still break through: Kingshot, released in March 2025, is already one of the ten most installed idle games.
It is also the period we joined. We released Idle Ronin, Idle Summoner and Idle AI Factory on Google Play in September 2026: a cyberpunk idle RPG, a pixel art idle RPG and an idle factory tycoon.
What changed, and what did not
- The joke became a craft. Progress Quest mocked games that play themselves; today designers build whole economies around that idea.
- Offline progress became the core. What AdVenture Capitalist popularized is now in almost every idle game.
- Business models moved. Browser idle games were mostly free and simple; mobile ones added ads, purchases and passes. Our study found ads in 88% and purchases in 95% of them.
- The pleasure stayed the same. Numbers going up, decisions that matter, and progress while you live your life.
FAQ
What was the first idle game?
Progress Quest, released by Eric Fredricksen in 2002, is usually called the first idle game.
When did Cookie Clicker come out?
On August 8, 2013 in the browser. The official Android version followed on October 5, 2020, and the Steam version on September 1, 2021.
Why are idle games so popular on phones?
They fit the way people use phones: short sessions, several times a day, with progress continuing in between. Our guide to why idle games feel so good goes deeper.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Incremental game, Progress Quest, Cow Clicker, Candy Box!, A Dark Room, Cookie Clicker, Clicker Heroes, AdVenture Capitalist.
- Alharthi et al., Playing to Wait: A Taxonomy of Idle Games, CHI 2018.
- Spiel et al., "It Started as a Joke": On the Design of Idle Games, CHI PLAY 2019.
- Google Play release dates and install counts (US), September 2026.
