A black circle on a street grid. Steer it under a pedestrian and the pedestrian is gone; under a car and the car tips in; grow large enough and the skyscrapers follow. Hole City is a two-minute arcade game that runs in the browser with no download and no account, built by x9m8 and hosted at apps.x9m8.com/hole2. It belongs to a small, strange genre that appeared almost overnight in 2018, produced Apple’s iPhone game of the year and one of the year’s most-downloaded mobile games, and started an argument about who owns the idea of a hole.
Video: Annapurna Interactive, “Donut County | Reveal Trailer”
How the game plays
Two minutes, eight holes, one city
Pick a name and a hole skin, choose an environment, and press Enter Simulation. The round lasts two minutes. Move the hole with WASD or the mouse. Anything smaller than the hole’s current diameter falls in when it passes over, and every object swallowed adds to the score and nudges the diameter up. Pedestrians and street furniture come first, then cars, then the low buildings, and in the last stretch of a good round the towers.
Seven computer-controlled holes share the map and compete for the same objects. A leaderboard on the right tracks the standings live, and a larger hole can swallow a smaller one. The Reset button restarts the round. There is no save, no progression and no in-app anything; the game is the two minutes.
The city is drawn in a flat, top-down style with a traffic grid, dashed lane markings and shadows under the buildings. It is deliberately light on the eye so that the only thing that changes meaning as the round goes on is scale. A bus that was an obstacle at the thirty-second mark is food at ninety.
Where the idea came from
Donut County, and a raccoon with a remote-controlled hole
The hole-as-player-character arrived in public through Ben Esposito’s Donut County, published by Annapurna Interactive and released on 28 August 2018 for PlayStation 4, PC, Mac and iOS. Its premise is that a raccoon named BK runs a donut-delivery app that secretly sends holes, which consume the town’s homes and residents; the player steers a hole that grows with every object it swallows until the whole scene is underground. The game had been in view for years before release. Esposito built it in his spare time and first showed a demo at IndieCade in October 2012, under an earlier title. After launch, Apple named it the 2018 iPhone game of the year and it won Mobile Game of the Year at the 2019 SXSW Gaming Awards.
Donut County has a story, dialogue and a point to make about convenience and consequence. The mechanic underneath it, a growing hole that eats a scene in size order, turned out to be portable.
The clone that outran the original
Hole.io, Voodoo and ten million downloads
The French mobile studio Voodoo developed and published Hole.io in 2018, first on Android and iOS, later for browsers and, in June 2024, for Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. The player controls a hole that grows by swallowing objects, and a larger hole can consume a smaller one. The main mode asks the player to become the largest hole by the end of a two-minute round; a Battle mode is a last-hole-standing elimination, and a Solo mode scores how much of the city is consumed in the time.
It climbed to the top of the free charts on the App Store and Google Play soon after release and passed ten million downloads on Google Play alone. One early reviewer called it “oddly satisfying and addictive.” Others called it something else.
The copying argument
Donut County came out the same year, and critics quickly described Hole.io as a clone of it. Esposito’s team alleged that Voodoo had copied the idea; in an August 2018 interview Esposito drew a line between developers like Voodoo and creators who come up with original ideas, and placed himself on the second side. Variety reported that Voodoo’s catalogue consists of clones of other games. A second complaint was about the opponents: the holes in Classic and Battle mode are computer-controlled, not other people, which critics called misleading given how the game was promoted.
The two games share a verb and almost nothing else: Donut County kept its raccoon and its story, Voodoo kept its downloads, and the mechanic itself went on to a third life in dozens of imitators. Hole City is one of them, and it says so. Its opponents are labelled as AI on the leaderboard and it makes no claim to be multiplayer.
The “.io” in Hole.io
A cell, a snake, and a domain suffix that became a genre
The suffix is not decoration. The browser-game wave that Hole.io rode is characterized by the use of the .io top-level domain, and its founding title is Agar.io, an arena game in which players grow by eating smaller cells and avoiding larger ones. Matheus Valadares, a 19-year-old Brazilian developer, announced it on 4chan on 27 April 2015. It birthed a wave of new .io titles from around 2016, among them Slither.io, Steven Howse’s free-for-all take on the Snake genre, and eventually Hole.io.
Hole City descends from both lines. From Agar.io it takes the one rule that defines the genre, eat what is smaller than you and avoid what is bigger. From Donut County it takes the hole and the city. The .io games were mostly simple clones of popular games, usually in a top-down format, and the honest thing to say about Hole City is that it sits in that tradition too, with the difference that it is free of ads, accounts and the pretence of human opponents.
What makes the mechanic work
Scale as the only progression
Most games give the player new abilities. The hole genre gives the player one ability and changes what it applies to. At the start, the hole is smaller than a car, so cars are walls; a minute later they are snacks, and the map that was a maze has become a buffet. Nothing about the controls changes between those two states. The player’s sense of the city changes instead, and that reversal, obstacle into food, is the whole emotional arc of a round.
Two design constraints make it satisfying rather than tedious. The first is the ordering: objects must be graded in size finely enough that there is always something just barely too big, so that growth is always rewarded with new targets. The second is the clock. Two minutes is short enough that the late-round power trip, swallowing buildings whole, lasts only seconds. Hole.io picked two minutes; Hole City uses the same length for the same reason.
Running Hole City
Controls, settings and known limits
- Move: WASD or the mouse.
- Round: two minutes, then a final leaderboard; Reset starts another.
- Skins: four hole styles, cosmetic only.
- Environments: Metro City, with others listed on the start screen.
- Works on desktop and touch screens; a phone in landscape gives the most room.
The game is a React application compiled to static files and served from GitHub Pages; the source is public. There are no accounts, no tracking inside the game and no server; the leaderboard lives in the page and vanishes with it. Scores are not kept between rounds, on purpose.
More x9m8 apps are collected under Apps, including the Cellular Automata Lab, which is another two-minute way to watch a simple rule eat a grid.
Sources
- Hole.io development, modes, charts, reception and the Donut County dispute: Wikipedia, Hole.io
- Donut County premise, development history and awards: Wikipedia, Donut County
- Donut County release date and platforms: Gematsu, “Donut County launches August 28”
- Agar.io, Slither.io and the .io wave: Wikipedia, .io games
- Video: Annapurna Interactive, Donut County Reveal Trailer
