It happens less and less, but from time to time, great things happen on the internet. A person wakes up one day, sits down at their computer, and creates a silly, simple, and friendly mini-game that attracts thousands of users. It happened with Wordle (who is now famous), and now it’s happening again with something simple and very fun like One Million Checkboxes.

Who is behind?. This website was developed by Nolen Royalty, better known in the Internet world as eieio. The developer has made a few “weird things,” as he calls them, like Stranger Video (which connects you to another unknown person to see who can last the longest) or Breaktime, a Chrome extension that turns Google Calendar into a Breakout genre. Mini game.

One Million Checkboxes. This is the name of this new project, which was launched on June 26 and managed to bring together more than half a million people in just two days. So what does it consist of? While checking the boxes. There are a million boxes on the website, and when we check or uncheck a box, that box is checked or unchecked for everyone who plays. No goals, no competitions, no rankings: you just have to tick the boxes.

Hey, my box! All we have is a counter that shows how many boxes we’ve checked, how many boxes we’ve checked in total, and a box finder where you can try to check off the box of your favorite number. There are also boxes marked with colors that appear to represent other people’s cursors. The problem is… that’s all. Every person competes with themselves, and that has a certain appeal.

Did it really hook you? And it’s a lot. The website is designed to be constantly updated to show how users are checking and unchecking boxes; so you’re always watching to make sure no one unchecks your boxes. That’s okay, because you’re not going to lose it or anything like that, but you’ve ticked that box and of course it’s yours, there’s more.

To give you some data, Nolan confirmed a few hours ago that One Million Checkboxes had over 500,000 players ticking 60 million boxes today alone, or 42,000 per minute. For more context, Wordle launched in October 2021 and had 90 players by November, a month later. It didn’t even manage to reach 300,000 daily players until January 2022.

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