First look: These days, a big online game is one that can drop 100 strangers onto the same map at once. Jono, a free platformer that quietly landed on Steam earlier this month, goes in the opposite direction entirely: there's exactly one playable character for the whole planet, and everyone who downloads it has to wait in line for a turn.

Jono is the work of Tuomas Erikoinen, the artist behind the original Angry Birds, who now makes games on his own as Part Time Monkey. In the game, when your turn finally comes up, you get exactly one minute to steer the tiny pixel-art hero past spikes, crushers, ice, and portals. Once done, the control passes to the next person in the queue, right where you left off.

Failure is cheap, since a death only sends Jono back to the start of the current room rather than wiping out anyone's progress. Each death does leave a gravestone behind, though, so the trickiest rooms slowly fill up with markers showing the next player exactly where not to jump.

Everyone stuck in the queue becomes the audience, watching the current player through what is essentially a built-in livestream and cheering, heckling, or spamming emotes in a shared chat. In a Reddit post, Erikoinen said the game is what draws people in, but he suspects the chat is what makes them stay. That might explain how over 540 players managed to send more than 85,000 messages in just 17 days.

One especially devoted player has cleared over 7,500 rooms alone, which barely dents the community's real goal of one million unique rooms.

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