How Cookie Clicker Was Made in 3 Hours (Orteil’s Story)

How Cookie Clicker was made is a short story with a long aftermath. A French developer who goes by Orteil — real name Julien Thiennot — wrote the first version in a single evening, often quoted as about three hours, and released it on August 8, 2013. It was a small, tongue-in-cheek browser toy. More than a decade later, it has millions of players, a Steam release, and an active modding community.

Who Orteil is

Julien Thiennot is a French web developer who works under the handle Orteil and publishes his browser projects through DashNet. He made small experimental browser games and toys before Cookie Clicker, and after its success he went on to release projects such as Idle Game Maker, a tool for building idle games without code.

That background matters because Cookie Clicker’s quick first build wasn’t a cold start. Orteil was already making small browser experiments, and the incremental format was in the air: Progress Quest (2002) had parodied grinding years earlier, and Candy Box! (April 2013) is widely credited as an immediate predecessor to Cookie Clicker’s format.

The one-evening build

On August 8, 2013, Orteil released what critics have since read as a parody — a game that reduced click-and-collect design to its absurd minimum. The original build had one big cookie, a counter, and a few things to buy. The mechanic was self-evident: click the cookie to make cookies; spend cookies on cursors, grandmas, farms, factories, and other producers that made cookies for you.

The joke landed because the format was already gathering momentum. Candy Box! had launched four months earlier and demonstrated that text-based incremental games could hold an audience. A Dark Room (June 2013) had pushed the format toward narrative. Cookie Clicker stripped the format back to its bones and let the absurdity speak. It spread fast after being shared online, with tens of thousands of players within hours.

Why it stayed live

The game’s audience grew faster than anyone expected, and the maintenance was light — the logic ran client-side with no backend. Orteil kept it up. Then he started adding features: new buildings, achievements, a prestige system (Heavenly Chips), and the “Grandmapocalypse” storyline.

The content updates over the years are the thing that turned a quick joke into a long-running game. Each major release added more layers — minigames inside buildings, sugar lumps, Krumblor the cookie dragon, hundreds of upgrades and hundreds of achievements. The original build is somewhere underneath all of it, still recognizable as the spine of the game.

The architecture

Cookie Clicker is a JavaScript web app that runs entirely in the browser. On the web, the game state lives in localStorage. The producer math is straightforward: each building has a base cookies-per-second value and a cost that grows by 15% per purchase. Production updates many times a second. There is no server-side validation, which is part of why save-editing has always been trivial and part of why the modding community is so active.

The simplicity of the architecture is what made the game extensible. A new building could be added as another entry in the game’s data. A new minigame could ship as a self-contained module. The codebase was small enough that a tiny team could maintain it for years and keep shipping new content.

The incremental-game lineage

Cookie Clicker is usually cited as the game that defined the modern incremental genre, but the lineage runs deeper. Progress Quest (2002) was the best-known “zero-player” parody of RPG grinding. Candy Box! (April 2013) added exploration and surprise. A Dark Room (June 2013) layered a survival narrative on top of resource accumulation. Cookie Clicker (August 2013) reduced the format to its core loop and made the loop the joke.

What Cookie Clicker did better than its predecessors was sustain. Candy Box! has a finite ending. A Dark Room has a narrative arc. Cookie Clicker has no end state — the game just keeps adding zeros to the cookie counter, and Orteil keeps adding new systems on top of the counter. That’s the format that countless incremental games have since built on: AdVenture Capitalist, Universal Paperclips, NGU Idle, Antimatter Dimensions, and more.

The Steam release

On September 1, 2021, Cookie Clicker launched on Steam at $4.99, published with Playsaurus. The Steam version added a soundtrack by C418 (the composer behind Minecraft’s music), Steam achievements, cloud saves, and some quality-of-life touches. The free web version remained — and remains — available with essentially the same core content.

The Steam release was the game’s biggest paid launch after eight years of free web play. Reception was strong; it drew more than 60,000 concurrent players on Steam shortly after release, and updates have continued to reach the free web build.

What the build teaches

Cookie Clicker is the cleanest example of the “ship a joke, watch it become a genre” pattern in web games. The quick first build isn’t a flex about productivity — it’s evidence that the format was so simple at the core that a single developer could express it in an evening. The decade of post-launch work is where the real game lives.

If you’ve ever clicked a button in an incremental game in the last decade, the design DNA traces back to that August release. For more on the format and its history, see our history of Cookie Clicker and our roundup of games like Cookie Clicker, or try a quick round of our simple Cookie Clicker-style game.

Frequently asked questions

Did Cookie Clicker really take 3 hours to make?

The first playable version is reported to have been written in a single evening, which is where the popular “about three hours” figure comes from. The thousands of hours of post-launch work — buildings, achievements, prestige systems, minigames — added the depth that the original joke didn’t have.

Who made Cookie Clicker?

Julien Thiennot, a French web developer known online as Orteil, made Cookie Clicker. It is published under DashNet, the label for his browser games.

What language is Cookie Clicker written in?

Cookie Clicker is a JavaScript web application, with the web version’s save stored in browser localStorage. There is no server-side game logic — the math runs in your browser.

Is Cookie Clicker still free?

Yes. The web version at orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ remains free and receives content updates. A paid Steam version launched on September 1, 2021, with a soundtrack by C418, Steam achievements and cloud saves.

What inspired Cookie Clicker?

The immediate predecessor most often cited is Candy Box! (April 2013), with A Dark Room (June 2013) arriving in the same wave; both showed that text-and-counter incremental games could hold an audience. Critics have also read it as a parody of social games like FarmVille and Cow Clicker. The Cookie Clicker Wikipedia entry covers the timeline.

The takeaway

How Cookie Clicker was made is the story of a one-evening parody that the internet refused to let die. Orteil shipped a joke, the joke held an audience, and he kept building on top of it for more than a decade. The result is one of the longest-running small-team web games in modern history. For another small-surface browser game with a similarly tight core loop, the Chrome Dino game at the top of this site offers a different kind of one-mechanic obsession: one button, one obstacle, no upgrade tree.

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