The fascination with “.io” games

Nick Sack, Staff Reporter|February 4, 2019

Imagine this: you’re at home, with nothing to do. It’s been snowing for days and you can’t get out of the house. You’ve seen all the movies you own and played every board game you can find. What do you do now?

Let me make a suggestion.

There is a fantastic genre of games on the Internet that I have coined as .io games, due to their URL ending in the titular ‘.io.’ There are tons of them and they’re actually quite fun.

The most popular one for a while was a game called agar.io, where you’d control a circle and go around trying to find smaller circles to eat and be as big as possible. Pretty simple, right? It’s hard to believe that this game is so incredibly popular despite its succinct design. Yet, there are always people playing it, and a ton of content has been made on it on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

Another popular game is called slither.io, similar to agar.io, but instead of controlling a circle, you control a snake, constricting around other players and again trying to become as big as possible.

There are a bunch of other games like this, with hours of fun awaiting anyone who types in the simple web addresses. There is another game out there that has tantalized my friends and I called krunker.io.

First off, it has an amazing name that just rolls off the tongue, “krunker.” Krunker is a game that is very similar to the Call of Duty franchise, with lots of different weapons to use and maps to play on.

I’ve never really been a big fan of first person shooter games, but this game was something different. I don’t know if it was the graphics from Roblox or the maps from Fortnite, but krunker was absolutely amazing. I invited my pals to play with me, and I couldn’t stop. I played for hours on end.

Soon I was getting pretty good and really styling on the other players. My friends showered me in praise and cheered my name as I won a fight one versus three and saved the game.

Look, I get that this is a majorly simple game and there a ton of other games that are way better but krunker is genuinely a different experience entirely. We are in the age of returning to simplicity, and krunker.io is a huge stepping stone in the right direction. So if you haven’t experienced the magic of these simple games, then you don’t know what you’re missing out on!