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 about three hours on August 8, 2013, as what he later described as a temporary joke. It was supposed to be live for a few days. More than a decade later, it has multi-million player counts, a Steam release, and an active modding community.

Who Orteil is

Julien Thiennot is a French web developer who has used the handle Orteil since the mid-2000s. Before Cookie Clicker, his portfolio at DashNet included experimental browser games like Idle Game Maker, the Nested universe simulator, and a handful of joke incremental concepts. He had been thinking about idle-game mechanics for years before the cookie joke crystallized.

That background matters because Cookie Clicker’s three-hour build wasn’t a cold start. Orteil had already prototyped incremental loops in earlier projects and had absorbed the design language of Progress Quest (2002) and Candy Box! (April 2013), the latter of which is widely credited as the immediate predecessor to Cookie Clicker’s format.

The three-hour build

On August 8, 2013, Orteil sat down to write what he later called a parody — a game that mocked the emerging idle-game genre by reducing it to its absurd minimum. The original build had one button, one cookie counter, and a few upgrade options. The mechanic was self-evident: click the cookie to make cookies; spend cookies on 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.

Why it stayed live

Orteil has said in interviews that he expected to take Cookie Clicker down within days. The game’s audience grew faster than he expected, and the maintenance was light — the original logic ran client-side with no backend. He kept it up. Then he started adding features: new buildings, achievements, a prestige system (Heavenly Chips), a series of major content updates branded as ascensions and grandmapocalypse.

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

The architecture

Cookie Clicker is a JavaScript single-page app that runs entirely in the browser. 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 roughly 15% per purchase. The cookies-per-second ticks update on a fixed interval. 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. Orteil could ship a new building update by adding entries to a JavaScript object. He could ship a new minigame as a self-contained module. The codebase was small enough that one person 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 first prominent “zero-player” parody of MMOs. Candy Box! (April 2013) added narrative 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 copied: Adventure Capitalist, Universal Paperclips, NGU Idle, Antimatter Dimensions, and more.

The Steam release

In September 2021, Cookie Clicker launched on Steam at $4.99. The Steam version added cloud saves, music by C418 (the composer behind Minecraft’s soundtrack), achievements that hook into Steam, and a few quality-of-life tweaks. The free web version remained — and remains — available with most of the same content.

The Steam release was Orteil’s first attempt at monetizing the game directly after eight years of running it for free. Reception was strong; the game charted in Steam’s top sellers in the week after release and has continued to receive content updates flowing back to 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 three-hour figure 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 quickly. 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 afternoon. For more on the format and its history, see our history of Cookie Clicker and our roundup of games like Cookie Clicker.

Frequently asked questions

Did Cookie Clicker really take 3 hours to make?

The initial playable build took roughly three hours on August 8, 2013, by Orteil’s own account. 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. He runs DashNet, the studio that has hosted the game and his other experimental browser games since the mid-2000s.

What language is Cookie Clicker written in?

Cookie Clicker is a JavaScript single-page web application with state 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 in September 2021 with cloud saves, a soundtrack by C418, and Steam achievements.

What inspired Cookie Clicker?

The immediate predecessors were Candy Box! (April 2013) and A Dark Room (June 2013), both of which demonstrated that text-and-counter incremental games could hold an audience. The deeper lineage runs back to Progress Quest (2002). The Cookie Clicker Wikipedia entry covers the timeline.

The takeaway

How Cookie Clicker was made is the story of a three-hour 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 single-developer 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.