The genre that started with a single cookie in 2013 has quietly become one of the internet’s stickiest habits. The latest version even has brainrot’s name on it.
It all started with one cookie
In August 2013, a French programmer who goes by Orteil coded a browser game in a single night and posted it online, where players clicked a giant cookie to bake one cookie at a time. Cookie Clicker was the result, and it is widely credited with establishing the idle game genre, sometimes called incremental gaming. The premise sounds like a joke: you click a cookie, a number grows, and you spend that number on cursors and grandmas that click for you, then watch the whole thing snowball while you do almost nothing.
That simplicity was the draw rather than a flaw. The game has no real ending, and its humor curdles into cosmic horror as the cookie count climbs into the absurd. It became a phenomenon anyway, and more than a decade later it is still expanding, reaching Steam in 2021 with over 60,000 concurrent players shortly after release and arriving on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch in 2025.
The number goes up, and so does the dopamine
The appeal is almost embarrassingly basic. One breakdown of the genre’s design points to the rush players feel watching a number climb, noting that people simply love big numbers, even when those numbers represent nothing real. Clicking a cookie is not stimulating on its own, yet making a counter tick upward over and over somehow is.
Researchers have tried to explain why low-effort games hook people the way demanding ones do. One academic account of game enjoyment argues that players are chasing the feeling of doing better than expected, the small surprise of progress arriving faster than predicted. Idle games deliver that surprise on a loop, which is part of why a genre built on barely playing keeps people coming back.
This is familiar territory for a generation raised on feeds engineered around the same instinct. Trill has written about how constant digital reward loops are rewiring the way people engage online, and clicker games run on a stripped-down version of that machinery, built around the same loop of tapping, collecting a reward, upgrading, and tapping again.
Brainrot found a new home
If clicker games felt like a relic of the early 2010s, the internet had other plans. “Brainrot,” the term for low-value online content and the mush it supposedly leaves behind, saw its usage jump 230% before Oxford named it the 2024 word of the year. It is the language of skibidi, rizz, and goofy ahh, a whole vocabulary Gen Z and Gen Alpha trade in daily.
It was only a matter of time before that energy met the click, and the genre has started absorbing the exact memes its critics warn about, turning brainrot itself into something you can tap.
The genre lives in a lot of places now
Cookie Clicker’s descendants are scattered across the internet. They live on Steam and consoles, in mobile app stores, inside Roblox as clicker and rebirth simulators, and on free browser hubs. Poki’s clicker games category is one of those homes, hosting more than 35 of them across idle, upgrade, destruction and merge styles. Fittingly, the most played title there right now is called Brainrot Clicker, where you tap meme characters and watch your coin count explode.
Tapping isn’t going anywhere
What keeps the format alive is also what makes it easy to dismiss. It asks for almost nothing, rewards you anyway, and bends to whatever the internet is fixated on that month, a cookie in 2013 and a meme character in 2026, even as the click itself stays the same. Whatever Gen Z is scrolling past next, there is a decent chance someone is already building a version of it you can tap.
