Among Us (Sus)

Origin¶

Among Us was made by InnerSloth, a tiny American studio co-founded by Marcus Bromander (aka PuffballsUnited) and Forest Willard, and released on June 15, 2018, for iOS and Android, with a Steam version following. Inspired by the party game Mafia and the paranoia of John Carpenter’s The Thing, it drops four to ten players onto a spaceship: most are Crewmates completing maintenance tasks, while one or more secret Impostors sabotage systems and quietly kill. A discovered body triggers an “emergency meeting,” where players argue over who is acting “sus” (suspicious) and vote someone out. For nearly two years the game was a commercial afterthought, peaking around 1,800 concurrent players and nearly abandoned by its makers.

What it means and how it’s used¶

The game’s vocabulary and art escaped the game entirely. “Sus” became broad slang for anything shady; the bean-shaped crewmate silhouette became instantly recognizable; and “when the impostor is sus” turned into a self-referential joke about the meme’s own emptiness — an early taste of “brainrot” humor. “Emergency meeting,” “vent,” and dramatic impostor reveals all became reaction shorthand far beyond the game itself.

How it spread¶

The breakout came in the summer of 2020. Streamers in Brazil and South Korea popularized it first, then enormous Western creators — Sodapoppin, xQc, Pokimane, Valkyrae, Ninja, and PewDiePie — turned it into a phenomenon during pandemic lockdowns, when friends could play together while apart. It hit an all-time Steam peak of 438,524 concurrent players on September 26, 2020, and roughly 3.8 million concurrent players across all platforms at its height, with InnerSloth reporting around 500 million monthly players by November 2020. On October 20, 2020, US Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar streamed Among Us on Twitch to more than 400,000 concurrent viewers — one of the biggest debut streams in the platform’s history. The sudden surge overwhelmed InnerSloth’s tiny team, whose servers repeatedly buckled under the influx of millions of new players, while the game sat atop mobile and Steam charts for months. InnerSloth cancelled a planned “Among Us 2” in September 2020 to keep expanding the original instead.

Notable examples and variations¶

• “Amogus,” a deliberately distorted crewmate drawing, and the “when the impostor is sus” catchphrase.
• Spotting crewmate-shaped objects “in real life” and calling anything shady “sus.”
• New maps beyond the original Skeld — Mira HQ, Polus, and The Airship (2021).
• Fan animations and the crewmate becoming a widely licensed silhouette on merch.

Legacy¶

Among Us is a rare case of a video game rewriting everyday speech. “Sus” has outlived the game’s 2020 peak and settled into general slang, and the crewmate remains one of the most recognizable shapes of its era — a gateway to the absurd, self-aware brainrot humor that followed it.