Jamie Cason of Miniclip.
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The surprising momentum behind games like Agar.io

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

If you haven’t paid attention, there’s a surprisingly strong genre of browser-based games dubbed .io games. The name comes from the .io extension files, and one big hit is Miniclip’s Agar.io.

Agar.io debuted in April 2015, developed by a single Brazilian developer, Matheus Valadares. It’s a simple browser-based game where you play as a single-cell animal moving around a kind of graph paper environment. You swallow other cells and creatures so you can grow.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.