When Among Us launched in June 2018, nobody cared. In 2019, Innersloth released two new maps, MIRA HQ and Polus, and nobody cared. Even in the first half of 2020, nobody cared.
Among Us Was A Big Sleeper Hit For InnerSloth
It wasn't until July of 2020, when the world was a couple of months into a global pandemic, that the general gaming public took notice of the game. That summer, popular Twitch streamer Sodapoppin started playing Innersloth's multiplayer murder mystery game, kickstarting its rise to extreme popularity. Prominent streamers and YouTubers like Pokimane and Pewdiepie hopped on the bandwagon, and a game that had already run its course was suddenly experiencing belated, stratospheric success.
I'm always fascinated by this kind of story. As a creative person, I'm familiar with the experience of putting something out — something that you worked really hard on for a really long time — and nobody seeming to care. This happens with articles all the time. You spend a ton of time working on a review or a reported piece with a bunch of sources, and it barely gets any views when you post it. Worse, it might even get massively outperformed by a blog you spent a mere 30 minutes writing.
It's happened in my extracurricular projects, too. I worked on a short film for multiple years — writing the script, finding actors, locations, and props, shooting it, working with an editor and sound editor over the course of a year of post-production, doing a final sound and edit pass myself, researching festivals, and spending a bunch of money to send it out — only for it to mostly get a crickets reception.
This is okay. That's how creative projects work. You can't predict the life of a piece of art, you can only make it to the best of your ability and hope that it finds an audience. Most art doesn’t reach a wide audience, but there’s value in the act of creation for yourself and the few people it ends up impacting.
The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess Was A Big Sleeper Hit For Chappell Roan
But then you have things like Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. The up-and-coming pop star released the album on September 22, 2023. It was well-received by critics, but didn’t make much of a splash until this summer. In June, it reached the Billboard top ten, and three of its singles also charted on the Hot 100.
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is a success, but if you had checked on it in late 2023 or early 2024, you would have thought it came and went without making much of a stir. Now Roan is omnipresent on TikTok with the Hot to Go chorus becoming a viral sound used by countless creators, and her follow-up single Good Luck, Babe is charting, too. This all happened nine months after the album’s initial release. It slowly built word of mouth as Roan did public appearances — I heard her music for the first time when she did an NPR Tiny Desk Concert four months ago and was hooked by Pink Pony Club — and eventually became a huge hit.
This is a bizarre arc for any album or game or movie or book to have. For years, a work’s success or failure was determined by how it did right out of the gate, but that seems to be changing. Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania looked like a huge hit when it opened, but ended up being a commercial disappointment. Anyone But You looked like a commercial disappointment when it opened, but ended up being a huge hit. Among Us and Escape from Tarkov show the same is true in video games, and Fortnite's sudden success after its pivot to battle royale might be the ultimate example. The opening frame isn’t the full story, not for Chappell Roan, and not for Among Us.
