More than 100,000 people are currently playing a Steam game where you click a banana

Steam is home to some absolutely brilliant games – everything from psychological horrors to adorable pet sims. It is also home to a game simply called Banana.

“What exactly is Banana?” I hear you ask. Well, it’s a free game where you do nothing more than click on the image of a banana, as a counter keeps a tally of how many times you have clicked it.

And yet, despite this simple concept, there are over 100,000 people currently playing Banana.

At the time of writing, 137,817 Steam users are clicking away at a banana on a screen (or at least have the game open).

To put that into comparison, there are currently 42,521 people playing Helldivers 2, Ghost of Tsushima has 23,511 current players and Hellblade 2 has 199. Even with Banana being a free game to download, it is still quite something to see these figures… so, of course I had to give it a go.

Ladies and gentlemen, Banana became the first game I ever managed to get all of the achievements for. I thought this was because I’d clicked the banana 100 times, which awarded me with the ‘Click’ accolade, but after looking further you unlock this achievement after having the game open for one minute, so maybe I happened to click beyond 100 after 60 seconds.

Surely there must be more to Banana than that? Even though I had my achievement, I kept on clicking. I had a hunch that something would happen when I hit 1000 clicks.

997, 998, 999… the moment of truth was here. I clicked again and… nothing happened. The banana on my screen remained as it had been from the very beginning.

Despite this seemingly benign gameplay, further digging has led me to the Banana Discord, and the revelation that this game is not simply an idle pastime. It is actually a game that lets players collect bananas to sell in Steam’s marketplace, which tops up their Steam wallet.

Some bananas on the marketplace are going for mere pennies (the Pandanana banana is currently on there for 3p), but others are being sold at a much higher price. There is a Crypticnana banana currently on there with a starting price of £254.52. Apparently there are only 25 of these bananas in existence.

As far as I can tell, there isn’t any shady blockchain situation going on with the whole Banana movement, but it is certainly not what I was expecting to come across this afternoon. To each their own, I guess.