A free Steam platformer from Angry Birds’ original artist lets one stranger play at a time while everyone else watches.
That artist is Tuomas Erikoinen, and he built Jono around a worry most small developers share. He said “there’s been tons of cases where some small game gets popular overnight and it gets replicated within hours,” and Alliance Arts shared that fear when it scrapped its public demo this month over AI copying worries.
The issue is that anyone can clone a clever mechanic in an afternoon, but Erikoinen realized nobody can photocopy a few hundred strangers queuing up to share one character.
What is Jono, the Steam game with a one-minute queue?
Jono launched free on Steam on October 4 from Erikoinen’s solo studio, Part Time Monkey, and the pixel art platformer gives exactly one person control for exactly one minute.
The next player in the queue then takes over from the spot where the last one stopped, while everyone else watches the live feed, cheers or complains in chat, or toils away in the level editor.
Every cleared room stays cleared for all, and every death resets only the current room and leaves a gravestone that warns the next player.
Erikoinen called Jono “a very experimental ‘game’” in a Reddit post, and the crowd embraced it anyway. According to him, over 540 people sent more than 85,000 messages in 17 days, and one player personally cleared more than 7,500 rooms.
The chat did much of the work, since “the chat is the reason they stay (I think),” he wrote, and strangers “cheer when someone gets through a hard level, joke around, talk about off-topic stuff and so on.”
An optional Meat Grinder mode quarantines levels too brutal for normal play, and one of them, DONT ASK HOW THE MEAT IS MADE, took 2,627 deaths and almost five hours before anyone got through.
At about 5,000 rooms a day, Erikoinen puts the million around April, and players have already started guessing at the finale, including one who predicts “Room 1M is gonna be the great graveyard.”
He has kept quiet about what happens at room 100,000, which players plan to stay up for this weekend.
Jono isn’t the only Steam oddity that treats its players as the experiment, since a $1,000 game where owners sign a shared wall launched in May with a similar social twist.
I’m Abhishek Sharma, an author at TigerJek.com. I enjoy exploring games, testing different strategies, and turning what I learn into clear, useful guides. My goal is to help players understand the game better and improve without the usual confusion.
