Planet Clicker: History and Timeline (2026)
Released March 2020 on Scratch, rebuilt in Unity for the 2022 sequel, and still played today. Here is the full release history and who built it.
Planet Clicker came out in March 2020, built on Scratch by a solo developer known as Coltroc. It reached the major browser game portals in late 2021, and Planet Clicker 2 followed in January 2022, rebuilt in Unity. The sequel’s last recorded update was April 2023. There is no third game.
Planet Clicker came out in March 2020, built by a solo developer using a free educational coding tool aimed at children. Six years later it still pulls six figures of monthly searches, which is not a normal outcome for a school-coding-platform project. This is the story of how that happened: who made it, why the tool it was built with shaped everything about the game, how it escaped the platform it was born on, and why the sequel arrived built on something completely different.
When Did Planet Clicker Come Out?
The original launched in March 2020 and the sequel followed in January 2022. Here is the full sequence, with the genre context that explains why the formula was already proven when Coltroc picked it up.
The Planet Clicker Release Timeline
-
August 2013
Cookie Clicker defines the incremental genre
-
March 2020
Planet Clicker released on Scratch by Coltroc
-
Late 2021
Reaches the major browser game portals, audience widens sharply
-
January 2022
Planet Clicker 2 launches, rebuilt in Unity
-
April 2023
The sequel receives its last recorded update
-
2023 to 2026
No third game announced, both titles still widely played
Two things stand out. The gap between the original and its sequel was under two years, and the gap since has been more than three.
Who Is Coltroc?
Both games were made by a developer who goes by Coltroc, working on the Scratch platform. There is no studio, no publisher and no press presence. What exists is a catalogue of browser games and a lot of plays.
Alongside the two Planet Clicker titles, Coltroc built Candy Clicker and Candy Clicker 2, which use the same clicking-and-upgrading loop with a sweets theme instead of a solar system. That pairing tells you something useful: this is a developer who found a formula that worked and rebuilt it twice in two different settings.
Six million plays puts the original among the most-played projects on a platform hosting tens of millions of them — and that figure does not count the far larger audience it later found on browser game portals.
Why It Was Built in Scratch
Scratch is a free visual programming environment developed at MIT, designed to teach coding to children using drag-and-drop blocks rather than typed syntax. It is not a commercial game engine, and building a game there imposes real constraints. Three of those constraints shaped Planet Clicker directly, and you can still feel all three when you play it.
Three Limitations That Became Design
It is worth appreciating the inversion here. Every trait that makes Planet Clicker unusual in its genre started as a limitation of a children’s coding tool — and most of them turned out to be strengths.
The no-save quirk is the one that catches new players out most often, and we cover it fully in the beginner’s guide.
How It Escaped the Platform
A Scratch project reaches Scratch users. That is a large audience, but a young and self-contained one.
The shift came in late 2021, when the game began appearing on the major browser game portals. Those sites carry enormous general traffic, and a game that had been popular within one community suddenly reached everyone. The audience roughly changed character overnight, from people who make games to people who only play them.
Video helped as well. Playthroughs of runs reaching absurd energy totals circulated widely, and a game whose entire appeal is a number growing out of control turns out to be well suited to short-form video. The result is the shape of demand today: searches for Planet Clicker still run into six figures monthly, years after the last update to either game.
The Sequel and the Rebuild
Planet Clicker 2 arrived in January 2022, less than two years after the original, and it was not an update. It was a rebuild. The original ran as an embedded Scratch project; the sequel was built in Unity 2020, a full commercial game engine. That single decision explains almost every difference between the two games.
Original vs Sequel: What the Rebuild Changed
| Planet Clicker | Planet Clicker 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Released | March 2020 | January 2022 |
| Built with | Scratch (MIT, block-based) | Unity 2020 |
| Worlds | 3 (Earth, Mars, Venus) | 6, out to Neptune |
| Visuals | Original Scratch art | Redrawn and updated |
| Shop pricing | Flat price per item | Rises with each purchase |
| Saves progress | No | Yes |
| Last update | — | April 2023 |
The Licence That Created a Copy Problem
Here is a piece of the history most people never learn, and it explains a lot of what you find in search today. Scratch projects are published under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence. Anyone may legally take the original, modify it and republish it, provided they credit the creator and license their version the same way.
For Planet Clicker, that had two consequences.
All of which feeds the confusion documented in our guide to whether a Planet Clicker 3 exists. The open licence that helped the game spread is the same thing that made its version history so difficult to follow.
Why People Still Play It in 2026
Most browser games from 2020 are gone. Flash died, hosting lapsed, developers moved on, and the titles that survived were mostly the ones with companies behind them. Planet Clicker has no company behind it and is still here, for reasons that have little to do with nostalgia.
It respects your time.
A complete run takes under an hour. In a genre built around retention loops designed to pull you back for months, a game with an actual ending is genuinely rare.
Nothing costs money.
No premium currency, no ad-gated upgrades, no paid boosts. The economy is honest in a way that has become unusual.
It needs nothing from you.
No account, no download, no install. Open a tab and it works, which is also why it spread through schools and workplaces so effectively.
The maths is satisfying.
Exponential growth is a reliable pleasure, and the game delivers it cleanly, with each purchase visibly speeding up the next.
Six years on, the reason it endures is the same reason it caught on. It does one thing, it does it without asking anything of you, and then it finishes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Final Thoughts
The short answer to when Planet Clicker came out is March 2020. The longer answer is more interesting, because almost everything distinctive about the game traces back to a decision that looks like a limitation.
Building it in a children’s coding tool meant no saves, no prestige system, a hard numeric ceiling and a design simple enough to finish in an evening. In 2020 those read as compromises. In 2026, with the genre full of games engineered never to end, they read as the reason it is still here.