Back in April we discovered Bongo Cat, a silly idle game about a cat with a hat who smacks your screen when you type. Silly, but also huge: Bongo Cat was one of the biggest games on Steam at the time, holding the number 12 spot on Steam's most played chart. Four months later it's still riding high on the charts, and earlier this week it got even better—because Bongo Cat is now multiplayer.
The "Co-op Meowtiplayer Update" launched earlier this week, enabling up to 100 cats to come together in a proper clowder of screen-slapping digital kitties. Like the game itself, there's really nothing more to it: It's Bongo Cat, except a whole bunch of Bongo Cats all at once.
It's also very simple to set up, which is a big part of the appeal because—again, just like the rest of Bongo Cat—it's basically fire and forget: You can invite Bongo Cat-playing friends directly, or enter a lobby code into the game to jump in with strangers. Everything else is handled by Steam, so once the code is entered cats will simply start popping on and off your screen until you leave the lobby or quit the game outright.
The Irox Games Discord has a channel dedicated to lobby codes, so I grabbed one at random and gave it a try. Within seconds, the party was started.
There's no interactivity in the multiplayer mode: The closest you can get is clicking on your cat to make them say "meow meow," which everyone else will see and can respond to in kind, if they're so inclined. But we all get to show off our outfits, and everybody's cat smacks as they type, which is oddly amusing to watch. Some people are bashing away furiously on their keyboards, their Bongo Cats bap-bap-bapping away in rhythm, while others are either hypnotized by the display, or have maybe left the room entirely.
Bongo Cat multiplayer Twitch stream? You better believe it. (And yes, I'm in there.)
You can see on SteamDB that Bongo Cat's player numbers have dropped precipitously near the end of July, from around 150,000 concurrents—and often much higher—to a 24-hour peak of 94,505. That, Bongo Cat creator Marcel Zurawka told Eurogamer, is the result of a crackdown on bots, which reportedly made up roughly half of the old concurrent player numbers. Bongo Cat's concurrent player count dropped to around 75,000 immediately after the crackdown, but has been ticking upward ever since.
