Banana: the ridiculous game going viral on Steam

There are some incredible-looking games on the horizon, from Doom: The Dark Ages to GTA 6. But judging by the charts on gaming platform Steam over the last few days, some people will play anything. Even a game that simply involves clicking an image of a banana.

Right now, 'Banana' is the no. 2 most played game on Steam, with over 700,000 players. There are no PS5 graphics here, nor Nintendo Switch levels of family-friendly creative ingenuity. No, it's literally a picture of a banana. So why's it so popular? Money, of course. (Fancy playing something a little more, er, considered? Take a look at the best games console deals available now.)

It turns out that the more the player clicks the banana, the more chance there is that a banana sticker will appear in the player's Steam wallet. Some of these are rarer than others (according to Polygon, they range from Diamond Banana to Pickle Banana to, everyone's favourite, Gentleman Banana, featuring a hat and shoes). These can be sold on the Steam Marketplace, where they're fetching, on average, $0.02 each. But one rare banana has already gone for $1,400. 

The whole thing is giving me flashbacks to the NFT days (were they really only a couple of years ago?), during which it seemed everyone online wanted to buy a jpeg of a monkey wearing a different hat. Those things sold for ridiculous amounts too – and to be frank, there's no amount that doesn't seem ridiculous for a picture of a banana – even if it's wearing shoes.

The game's developers have already admitted to Polygon that a third of the current players are bots, which begs the question of whether Steam will intervene at some point. But right now, Banana continues to challenge Chair Simulator for the title of weirdest game of the 2020s so far.