Trivia / Cookie Clicker

• Creator Backlash:
  • The game isn't at all apologetic in its Black Comedy, but even Orteil thought he went too far at one point - the "Child Labor" upgrade used to have "...and so much more receptive to whipping!" at the end of its description, but that part has since been removed.
  • Orteil had written two news ticker quotes joking about wearing masks and the cookie economy "being the new normal" amid the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic. They were later removed as the pandemic wore on, with Orteil admitting in the code that the jokes felt in poor taste to him.
  • Zig-zagged with the Stock Market minigame. Orteil said he thought it was way too slow, way too difficult, and way too obnoxious to engage with, but also said this made it perfectly accurate to the real deal and that he didn't want to alter it for that alone. The minigame would receive an indirect buff in the following update from the Supreme Intellect dragon upgrade, as well as a new item to trade alongside the new building, but was left mostly unchanged from there with most of the fundamentals being left perfectly intact.
• Dummied Out: Challenge Mode was added in 2016 with just one challenge option available, "Born Again"^note Ignore all New Game Plus benefits, allowing another chance at certain achievements that would otherwise only be available on a first run. This update also included text and images relating to a second challenge, "Trigger Finger"^note Scrolling the mouse wheel on the big cookie counts as clicking it; unspecified other changes to clicking behavior and a special Heavenly Chips upgrade for reaching 1 quadrillion cookies in this mode., but commented out.
• Follow the Leader: Inspired by Candy box!. Later imitators include Goomy Clicker, where you click a Goomy from Pokémon X and Y, and Clicking Bad, where you make and sell meth.
  • Invoked by Orteil himself when he released the Idle Game Maker, a tool to create your own games of that kind. The existing games show double or triple cases of this trope.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The dungeon system was going to add serious depth, including JRPG elements and a Minigame Zone, to what was once just a simple Idle Game about clicking on a cookie. Unfortunately, it only lasted one version of the beta, with the next ones removing it. Said version now exists as a standalone alongside the current beta and the normal version. For what it's worth, Orteil has mentioned multiple times plans to bring the concept back as a minigame for the Factory building.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content:
  • Some cookies upgrades are suggestions from Patreon supporters.
  • The "purrchase" pun idea was suggested by a fan.
  • A few suggestions for the game from the now-defunct DashNet Forums were added to the game, such as the Tiny Cookie achievement, and the name for one of the Cookies per Second achievements, Faster Menner, originates from a infamously poorly worded suggestion for a building that was merely a "fast man" that became a recurring inside joke on the forums.
• Schedule Slip: Easter 2014 took place on April 20. The Easter Update rolled out to Beta on May 17, due to Orteil's being sick through Easter and subsequent computer problems. He was still drawing the update's Easter eggs on the 15th.
  • There was a larger gap after October 2014. Even though he made many posts on his Tumblr in October and November 2015 about the updates he was working on, the following beta update was released on December 20th - over a year after the previous beta launched. The live update came out in February 2016.
  • The Dungeon minigame is by far the game's longest case of this. The beta for the Dungeons first launched in September, 2013. They still haven't been added; four minigames (including two based on buildings that didn't exist when Dungeons were first put into beta) made it into the game first. However, Orteil still is working on them as of the Steam release and hopes to add them in the future.
  • The mobile version was more or less frozen in time for about three years between October 2020 and November 2023. It did get a patch in July 2022, but it only contained a fix to a scaling bug without any new content. That said, the patches released after the wait have ported over a good amount of content from the other versions in a short amount of time.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: When the game came to Steam, the icon for the Meme, Business Day's replacement for the Wizard Tower, was changed from Pepe the Frog to a cookie-based Expy of the Nyan Cat. While there had been no legal action directed at Orteil specifically, Steam had had to take down all Pepe-themed emojis from their platform a couple years prior due to the sellers not owning the rights to the character, so he changed the icon preemptively just in case.
• Word of God: The "egg" upgrade giving 9 CPS has nothing to do with the fact that the French words for "egg" (œuf) and "nine" (neuf) rhyme.
  [8/27/14 2:51:37 PM] Orteil: oh yeah actually
  [8/27/14 2:51:41 PM] Orteil: that wasn't intended
  [8/27/14 2:52:04 PM] Orteil: I make a lot of puns that go unnoticed but people have been reading way too much into egg

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