Among Us is a thrilling game where players are constantly under attack.
Not only do they have to deal with tentacled impostors who are very fond of knives, but
there are the suspicious fellow players ready to chuck you out of an airlock at the first
accusation.
And then there’s the rapidly collapsing ship, the deadly electric system, and the
malfunctioning light system to contend with.
There’s never a dull moment, but at its core Among Us is a classic game of social
deduction.
Its roots however lie not in high-tech gaming, but in a Russian university in decades past.
The year was 1987, and Dimitry Davidoff was studying psychology at Moscow State University.
He was a busy man, combining his full-time college studies with a job teaching local
high school students.
He needed a way to combine the two to save himself some time, so he hatched an idea - why
not turn his duties into a game?
He needed to study social behavior under pressure-filled situations, and the game that would become
Among Us decades later was designed to test people’s bonds when suspicion was everywhere.
But the first version of the game didn’t involve alien impostors.
The threat was much more down to Earth.
It was the 1980s, and few things were hotter than mob movies like The Godfather.
So the first version of the game was called Mafia.
But the dynamic was simple.
The players would be divided into two teams - civilians, and mafiosos.
Before the start of the game, each player would receive a card, the only item needed
to play.
On each card would be printed the player’s role in the game - something they would keep
secret from everyone else in the game.
The game starts with a random number of people, with Davidoff originally having a third of
the people in the game be mafia.
The number of players would start dwindling quickly.
The game was divided into two phases - night and day.
Each round would begin with night, when all players close their eyes, but the mafia members
open their eyes and identify each other silently.
They then gesture to the non-mafia member they want to kill, and the round ends, with
the real chaos beginning as the day phase begins.
The players open their eyes, and the moderator announces who the mafia hitmen have “killed”.
Now it’s time to debate, as the players accuse each other of being an enemy among
them.
Anyone can accuse anyone else for any reason, and it’s up to the accused to defend themselves
and hope they can fend off the impending vote.
Eventually, the debate ends and everyone casts a vote to eliminate someone.
And the cycle continues until the hitmen are all eliminated - or the hitmen are even with
the players, meaning the bad guys win.
Mafia remained a cult game that spread around the world, but it didn’t break into the
mainstream - until ten years later when it got a supernatural twist.
It was 1997 and the popularity of monster movies was waning.
Horror movies, however, were booming, and that didn’t escape the attention of interactive
fiction writer and developer Andrew Plotkin.
He looked at the rules and realized that the concept of an enemy that was hidden during
the day and killed at night fit werewolves perfectly - and so a new game was born.
Werewolf kept most of the rules of Mafia, but the number of enemies could vary based
on the number of players.
There was one other big change - and it started to even the odds for the hunted civilians.
Winning a game of Mafia or Werewolf is challenging because the enemy is allowed to conspire together
and everyone else isn’t.
That means they have an instant advantage.
The only way the civilians can usually compete is if they’re allowed to use a pen and paper
to keep track of voting patterns, but that’s not usually permitted in the rules.
Davidoff was a student of psychology and was most interested in exploring the social dynamics
of the game, but Plotkin was a gamer and storyteller at heart - and he had no problem introducing
new elements and powers to the classic game.
Enter the Seer.
The seer or detective is a third role in the game that can tell whether a player is a mafioso
or werewolf.
During the night phase, they’ll wake up and point at a player.
The narrator will then either nod or shake their head to indicate whether the player
they chose is an enemy or not.
This role is randomly selected and secret like all the others.
The seer can be a secret weapon on the side of the civilians - if they can survive.
The challenge is that if they’re too good at identifying the enemy, the werewolves will
likely band together and kill them off immediately.
And of course, if they seem to know too much and are deemed a little “sus”, the other
players might decide they’re acting weird and kill them off just to be safe.
These four roles are present in almost any modern game of Mafia or Werewolf - but the
evolution of the game was just beginning.
Plotkin’s version of Werewolf was the one that broke out into the mainstream, and it
became a popular party game around the world.
After all, what says fun party games like plotting to murder your friends?
It also helped that you didn’t need any equipment besides a couple of hand-written
cards and an organized moderator.
But like with any simple thing, people soon started complicating it - and future versions
of the game started giving just about everyone a unique role.
The civilians, werewolves, seer, and moderator were about to get some company in their little
cursed village.
Other investigators like the psychic or fortune-teller were introduced, who had the power to determine
not just a player’s alignment but their exact role.
The witness or child, meanwhile, gets the information of everyone’s alignment right
at the start of the game - and then has to figure out what to do with it without any
additional powers.
These civilians in the know are probably in a lot of danger - but don’t worry!
Help is coming.
The introduction of protectors, often called Guardian Angels or Bodyguards, changed the
game once again, as for the first time the civilians had the ability to survive a werewolf
attack.
Each round the person in the protector role would point to one player they wanted to give
immunity to.
If that person was targeted by the wolves that night, they would miraculously survive.
The problem was, the protectors weren’t omniscient and didn’t have any extra powers
- so they could easily accidentally protect a werewolf.
Different games had different powers, with some giving the protector the ability to protect
themselves and others only to give protection to others.
Starting to get a little busy in that European village?
The game was about to take its next evolution.
Most versions of the game started with firm alignments and everyone stayed there until
the end.
But a new variation of the game based on John Carpenter’s The Thing started making its
way around fan communities in the late 1990s, and with it came new game mechanics.
This was usually a much larger game, and for the first time, there was a new fate awaiting
players besides being voted out or killed by the monster.
In the movie, the twisted shapeless monster in the Arctic liked to infect other players
- turning them into living vectors to reproduce.
So at any time in the game version of The Thing, a player who was one of the infected
could turn someone else in the game instead of killing them.
As the game grew in popularity, it evolved like a game of telephone.
New moderators would invent new rules and roles.
Some games would feature a vigilante or monster hunter who had the power to kill off players
on their own, trying to hunt down a werewolf or mafioso that the group wasn’t finding.
Others added roles of reanimators who could bring back a dead player, or mediums who could
ask questions of dead players.
Others even added double agents who were working with the villains but couldn’t be identified
as one of them.
Werewolf had come a long way since the Mafia Days in Moscow - but its next evolution wasn’t
going to be to the rules of the game.
The game was getting complicated, and nothing ruins a role-playing game like a moderator
who can’t keep track of all the roles.
That meant it was time for Werewolf and its many relatives to evolve into their natural
state - something you could purchase.
This was a far cry from the psychological experiment cooked up in a Russian classroom,
but its first phases were still relatively humble.
Tabletop game companies put out sets of cards for the game with fancy artwork for each role,
which took the burden off the moderator to assign them.
A board game version, Ultimate Werewolf, was released in 2008.
This also made it easier to switch themes around, with one of the most popular variants
of the game being Bang!
This card set, released in 2002, transported the game to a wild west setting and pitted
a group of outlaws against a sheriff and his deputies.
Similarly, The Resistance set the game in Camelot and set members of King Arthur’s
court against a ruthless gang of spies.
But it was the 2000s, and tabletop and card gaming couldn’t equal the popularity of
Werewolf’s next stop - the world of video gaming.
Among Us wasn’t the first video game inspired by the classic rules of Mafia and Werewolf.
As the internet became more of a social hub for gamers, games of Werewolf were frequently
played on message boards and in chat rooms.
Town of Salem, released in 2014, was the first major online multiplayer version and is based
around the famous witch trials, complete with multiple game modes with different rules.
Two years later, Werewolves Within took the experience to a new level, with the Oculus
Rift game allowing people to step into the world of the game through virtual reality
- giving them an up-close and personal look at the werewolves right before they were eaten.
But the old tabletop games were far from finished - and were about to take a controversial twist.
Released in 2016, Secret Hitler became the most popular tabletop version of Mafia yet
as it plunged people into the complex political scene of the Weimar Republic.
Pitting liberals against fascists as they tried to protect the President and pass policies,
the game features one player anonymously in the role of the famous dictator-in-waiting
- with the fascist players knowing his identity and trying to get him to the end of the game
so he can seize power.
Secret Hitler became one of the hottest party games of the last few years - as well as the
source of many arguments about turning the lead-up to World War Two into a party game.
The biggest games of Werewolf around, though, took place on a much bigger stage.
When Survivor debuted in America in 2000, suddenly everyone was glued to their TV screen
watching ordinary people backstab and vote each other out.
It was only a matter of time before the classic party game of Werewolf was transformed into
a reality TV show.
Latvia aired a version of the game with local celebrities lying to and eliminating each
other, but the American version went bigger - and more confusing.
Called The Mole, it took a collection of ordinary people and had them compete in challenges
to win money - but one of them was a mole, there to sabotage them in challenges and cost
them the money.
Each round they took a quiz on the identity of the Mole, but the elimination rules were
very different.
Each round the person who got the least questions right went home - and there was no way to
get rid of the Mole until they were unmasked in the final episode.
The game has come a long way since Dimitry Davidoff developed it in Moscow - but no one
was prepared for it to consume the internet in 2020.
So why is Among Us the most popular version of Mafia in the last thirty-plus years?
Part of it is that it’s the first version of the game to combine the classic suspense
of Mafia with a fast-paced video game environment.
The relatively simple rules make it easy to get into.
It’s easy to assemble a game with friends, but if you don’t know enough gamers, you
can just jump right into a game with strangers.
Of course, the easiest answer is that it’s 2020, we all have a lot more free time at
home, and as the game gained popularity, everyone wanted to get on board.
After all, nothing takes the edge off a stressful year like a little suspicion and murder.
For more on the history of video games, check out Sony vs. Nintendo - How Do They Compare?
(Video Game Company Comparison).
And for more on a different kind of mafia, check out Most Horrific Crimes - The Italian
Mafia.