Yesterday evening, the countdown timer atop the Cow Clicker pages finally elapsed, and as per the prophesy, the cowpocalypse was summoned.

Despite the players’ cowllective intelligence in solving the Cow ClickARG, despite their numerous supplications to the bovine gods in response to the threat of moo-msday, nevertheless the Cowpocalypse has come. All cows were raptured to their heavenly pastures. Even in Cow Clicker Blitz and in the Cow Clicker IF.

Cowpocalypse

The result is distinctly strange, as the game continues with empty pastures and missing cows. Players can still click where cows used to be, and a new Diamond Cowbell award for 1,000,000 clicks was added. In so doing, the game has perhaps reached its maximum level of minimalism, although its clear that nobody is clicking empty space, but rather they are clicking the memory of where a cow once nobly stood.

Is a second cowling possible? Perhaps…

published September 8, 2011

Comments

  1. Darius K.

    You should use your Cow Clicker money to purchase http://clicknothing.com from Clint.

  2. Ian Bogost

    Hahaha.

  3. arghpargh

    since you’re out of money to run it will the game just disappear one day?

  4. Ian Bogost

    I’m not out of money to run it. It will persist forever, I suppose. It’s much more likely that a Facebook platform change will take it out of commission than that anything else will.

  5. Lon

    I see dead cow-people clickers. I think rapture forgot about them…at least their astral part(s).

    reading wiki on this…lol. Sometimes the most unexpected and unwanted road bump presents you with a boost to do something unrelated but fulfilling…..which may be to rapture as many cows as you can. Do you think cows have a place in a DOOM like world? If they weren’t scary before…give them fire balls shooting out of their mouths and teeth like a shark…or just a lot of them in a farm villa setting and you got COW DOOM..Doom cow?

  6. VinKreepo

    Wow… My family has clicked those God forsaken cows over and over. They never paid you lol but still… And to think I thought it was just another stupid FB game. I hate what FB has turned into… Attention craving people suffocating under a billion cries of loneliness

  7. Abby

    My husband and I just listened to the story on NPR about your game. We both had the same question. If people bought the special cows, such as the $100 cow, how were you able to make those cows disappear? Did they not own them?

    I have never played any of these games, nor do I plan to do so, but I am interested in understanding a bit more about how it all works.

    Thanks for the entertaining story.

  8. John Sahr

    I just heard about Cow Clicker on NPR, having not heard of it all before the Cowpocalypse raptured all the cows away.

    So, what the heck. I logged into FB, found CowClicker, and clicked on the shadow of the cow that I have never actually seen. I guess that makes me very meta or something.

    Regardless of how meta I might be, the NPR story was fascinating.

  9. Anthony

    What’s crappy is the game was intended as a satire of the useless Facebook click games, but ended up being something transcendent, only to have the creator get huffy because no one “got it”, and take away something that people genuinely enjoyed.

  10. donna

    okay. i am not much into fb and i generally ignore all invitations to partake of “social” games but npr’s story tweaked my imagination. i keep thinking about the painted cows that popped up randomly (so it seemed anyway) all around manhattan a few years ago and my recent travels in india and clearly the raptured cows should have been moksha’d. karma being what it is, maybe all the cows can come back as cats? you are leaving a lot of meowny on the table ian…

  11. Cindy

    I’m not sure Cat Clicker has the same ring to it. Plus it might bring in a different kind of audience…