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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

I had the desktop version of this installed on my Windows XP machine. So, to me this is the original idle game. But is it? What came before? Surely nobody created something so perfect from nothing.

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> What came before?

It's the original idle game, but it's also a parody on RPG-grind. So the originals are MMORPGs, CRPGs, D&D, and so on, and PQ just replaced the human and their predictable behavior in a gated setting and flavored it with some humor.

Yep this. PQ is a huge satire of the grind RPG games do and the low-quality writing and such, especially in quests. Look at the things it says at the bottom "Fighting teenage werewolf" or "Fighting giant mini rat" etc. Its entirely satirical from top to bottom.

Its a huge criticism of the WoW/Ultima/Bard's Tale/MUD era. Thankfully, since about Dragon Age and Mass Effect, that stuff is less common and those works showed us that you can have RPG mechanics without the "kill a rat" grind or "fetch me my long lost magical object" grind stuff. In retrospect playing older games or MMOs feels so infantilizing and lazy writing. Its incredible how long we considered that acceptable.

I feel like they took off with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker , which was a satire that people unironically found hugely enjoyable. But that was much later in 2010. Everything has to start somewhere; maybe Progress Quest was the first idle game?

I'm not sure how much to trust the Wikipedia dates for these - it claims Cookie Clicker was 2013, but I'm sure there was a flash version of it before 2007, while I was in highschool.

You must misremember, because it was really released in 2013. Maybe you remember a different game?

I feel like the _release_ of cookie clicker might only be because it was a webpage before?

Edit: Never mind, that release was only a few years ago. Apparently memory gets wonky as you get older.

My best guess is a copy or remake, like how Angry Birds was basically a reskin of the really common cannon-firing flash games.

https://cookieclicker.fandom.com/wiki/Cookie_Clicker_Wiki

> Cookie Clicker is a Javascript game released by Orteil on August 8, 2013.

And as for not an idle game, yep.

> It is an "incrementer" game, as proclaimed by Orteil.

Cow Clicker and Cookie Clicker are not idle games. You have to interact with them constantly and the less you do the slower you progress.

Idlerpg for IRC is the opposite. If you act you are punished.

Progress Quest is totally idle. It has a bunch of internals that just increment numbers and pretend things happen. It’s an app you start and then don’t do anything at all with.

All the clicker games, and the weird unfolding games like A Dark Room, Candy Box, Paperclips, are kinda fun but not in the spirit of Progress Quest.

Yep, while you often do a lot of idling in the latter games, they're not really idle games. That's why the newer term, Incremental games, fits better.

Progress Quest is the first one that I had ever heard of. It was a pretty big uproar at the time because of how well-done it was. While I'm sure there was something before it, nothing was popular before it.

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