Orteil

Orteil is the online name of Julien Thiennot, a French web and JavaScript developer best known for Cookie Clicker, the 2013 browser game that is widely credited with popularising idle and incremental games. He builds his games and experiments under the DashNet banner, working on Cookie Clicker with long-time collaborator Opti.

Thiennot wrote the first version of Cookie Clicker in a single evening on August 8, 2013. Players click a giant cookie, then spend cookies on grandmas, farms and factories that bake automatically, while the flavour text drifts into cosmic horror. A link posted on 4chan brought around 50,000 players within hours; a month later it had more than 200,000 players a day, and Orteil wrote that traffic peaked at 1.5 million hits in a single day.

Instead of moving on, Orteil kept expanding the game for more than a decade, with major content drops such as the 2016 legacy update and the 2017 spiritual update. He opened a Patreon in October 2018 with the aim of making Cookie Clicker and other DashNet projects a full-time job, and an Android beta followed in 2019.

On September 1, 2021 Cookie Clicker launched on Steam through publisher Playsaurus, with a soundtrack by C418, and passed 60,000 concurrent players shortly after release. Console versions for PlayStation, Xbox and Switch followed in May 2025. Orteil closed the Cookie Clicker Patreon in January 2026, while the free browser version stays online.

Besides Cookie Clicker he has released Idle Game Maker, a tool that lets anyone build an idle game without code, the text adventure Nested, the RandomGen text generator and the browser strategy game NeverEnding Legacy, and co-made AdventureQuest Dragons with Artix Entertainment. He jokingly calls his work non-games, but Cookie Clicker's scale and longevity made it one of the most influential solo browser games ever made.