Steam Achievement names can be upsettingly long, Cookie Clicker discovers
Achievement names often feel like an afterthought. Usually forgettable, at best a mildly funny pun beeping onto your screen as an award for collecting 15 trinkets. But it turns out that Steam's cheevos may let you store a whole lot more than just a passing gag, a fact the developers of Cookie Clicker are acutely aware of.
Cookie Clicker recently made the jump to Steam, and as such, sports fancy new features like cloud saves and Steam achievements. But as spotted by digital artist Kha on Twitter, Cookie Clicker's developers evidently appear to have discovered that Steam achievements sport a shockingly long character limit—far beyond what could ever fit in that tiny pop-up in the corner of your screen.
found on the achievements page for cookie clicker: pic.twitter.com/4tM8olngO2September 6, 2021
There's a comic brilliance to the way the achievement bleeds off the page in the above tweet. But there's more to it, providing a brief Wikipedia summary of Nabisco founder Adolphus W. Green in a friendly, if matter-of-fact tone. In full, it reads:
"There's really no hard limit to how long these achievement names can be and to be quite honest I'm rather curious to see how far we can go. Adolphus W. Green (1844–1917) started as the Principal of the Groton School in 1864. By 1865, he became second assistant librarian at the New York Mercantile Library; from 1867 to 1869, he was promoted to full librarian. From 1869 to 1873, he worked for Evarts, Southmayd & Choate, a law firm co-founded by William M. Evarts, Charles Ferdinand Southmayd and Joseph Hodges Choate. He was admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1873. Anyway, how's your day been?"
At time of writing, only 5.9% of players have unlocked the achievement, rewarded for baking 10 sextillion cookies per second.
Despite being a good eight years old, Cookie Clicker still holds up. The game quickly reached an "overwhelmingly positive" rating on Steam—proof that while a lot may have changed in the past 10 years, our collective desire to see numbers go up (no matter how arbitrary those numbers may be) remains as strong as ever.