/r/place experiment contains tiny Among Us crewmates hidden throughout the canvas

Written by. Nick Mosier based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-04-05 19:01 JST)

Reddit’s /r/place subreddit held a social experiment of sorts from April 1 – 4. The experiment let users place one pixel on a 1,000 by 1,000-pixel grid, and after selecting a color, would have to wait 5 minutes before being able to place another. Under these conditions users gradually produced a large image. This same experiment was also conducted on April 1, 2017, being revived for the first time in 5 years. The resulting pixel art is truly a sight to behold.

A noteworthy point of the /r/place experiment is how users seemed to come together as if they planned it out beforehand. In the time lapse below, we can see various country flags, a recreation of the famous painting “The Night Watch,” Star Wars art, and various other motifs throughout.

There was also plenty of game related imagery from the triforce and Kirby to indie game representation from Undertale and Hollow Knight. But one gaming motif that was popping up all over the place was the crewmate from Among Us.

Among Us is a social deduction game that was released by developer Innersloth in 2018. And through word of mouth, the game became a smash hit in 2020, receiving a steady stream of updates since. Crewmates are the controllable characters in Among Us, and they certainly have a simple design that’s easy to depict in pixel form. But /r/place users were especially creative in how they implemented crewmates into their designs.

In the above images you can see what looks like a lemon, a scene from Star Wars, a cow, and other motifs unrelated to Among Us. But if you look closely, you’ll notice something interesting hidden in the details. There are little crewmates hidden throughout the canvas like some kind of subliminal messaging.

One user even made a tool to check just how many crewmates were in the image. According to this tool, the number of crewmates had reached 2,000 by the end. And while maybe not relevant, the tool also tracked data across different patterns used to represent crewmates, like “Normal Right,” “Minimongus Right,” and “No Backpack Minimongus Right.”

This year’s /r/place experiment had over 4.8 million participants and demonstrated the power of chaos and cooperation on the internet with amazing results. What compels us to draw these crewmates when presented with a canvas? Perhaps that’s a question for future generations to figure out.