Banana (Clicker Game)

About

Banana is a clicker and collection video game in which the player has to click on a banana to increase their click number, with players occasionally getting drops of various banana-themed items that can be sold on the Steam Community Market. The game went viral on social media in early June 2024, becoming the third most-played game on Steam, and a developer describing it as a "legal infinite money glitch."

History

On April 23rd, 2024, game developers aaladin66, Pony, Sky and AestheticSpartan released^[1] Banana, a free-to-play clicker game that involves the player simply clicking on a banana on a yellowish-green background, with the game measuring the number of clicks the player has made in the current game session (gameplay video shown below).

Notably, every three to 18 hours, the players receive a drop in their Steam inventory: a banana-themed item that cannot be used in the game but can be sold on the Steam Marketplace (example seen below, left). Additionally, users are able to submit designs for banana items on the game's Discord^[2] server (example seen below, right). As of June 2nd, 2024, the game's server had over 10,000 members, while the game was downloaded over 650,000 times.^[3]

On June 13th, the game reached a viral point as it became the third most-played video game on Steam with over 370,000 players, surpassing games such as Apex Legends, Destiny 2 and Grand Theft Auto. However, the developers of the game reported that more than half of the game instances were bot accounts farming item drops.^[4]

Impact

On June 11th, 2024, Polygon published an article about the viral game, with the developer team member Hery describing the game as the "legal infinite money glitch." The article listed examples of rare Banana items being sold for substantial amounts of money on Steam.

On June 13th, multiple users and news accounts reported on the game's virality. On that day, the X^[5] account @alphaINTEL made a post about the game being more popular than Apex Legends, which received over 130 reposts and 2,400 likes in one day (shown below).

Additionally, videos about the game were posted on YouTube and TikTok. As of June 13th, 2024, the official Discord had over 45,000 members.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References