Among Us Venting Physics: How Fast Are Crewmates, Really?

I love it when a goofy game mechanic gets the physics-treatment. You know the vent in Among Us, right? One second a crewmate is standing in a hallway, the next they are gone with a little whoosh, and everyone starts yelling in the chat. A Reddit user named semchon actually ran the numbers for a science project, and the results are exactly the kind of overthinking I want from this community.

Here's the short version: the vent is not a flimsy little grate. According to the project, it weighs around 150 kg, and opening it takes more than 17 joules of energy. Is that the most ridiculous sentence I've written about a social deduction game? Maybe. But it gets better.

The really wild part is the travel speed. Using the crewmate's official height of 1.07 meters as a scale, semchon estimated that a character moving between vents travels at almost 20 meters per second. That is roughly 45 miles per hour. Think about that for a second. Your tiny bean person is not just sliding through a tube; they are basically being fired through the ship's plumbing at highway speeds. No wonder nobody sees the impostor leave.

I have to laugh at the image of a crewmate popping a 150 kg vent open like it's a soda can and then rocketing through the ship. Are crewmates secretly super-soldiers? Are impostors just keeping up with them? The game never answers, and honestly, I don't want it to. The mystery is part of the charm.

This physics project also landed at a very Among Us moment. The game originally launched in 2018, but it became one of the defining hits of 2020. Its success was so big that developer Inner Sloth cancelled a planned sequel and put that energy back into updating the original game. That call looked smart at the time, and it still looks smart in hindsight. A 2021 Epic Games Store giveaway pushed the player count to 2 million at the end of May that year, which is the kind of number that makes a small social game feel like a global event.

The updates kept coming, too. The 15-player update was on the horizon back then, promising bigger matches and new features. Fans even got Inner Sloth to agree to let players honk the Airship horn when the update went live. In 2026, that update is no longer a future patch; it's part of the game's history. But I still like looking back at that era, because it shows how a simple game about lying to your friends turned into a whole culture.

And yes, the culture got weird. A McDonald's chicken nugget that happened to look like an Among Us crewmate sold on eBay for $99,997. The seller had hoped for $1,000. The nugget came from a BTS Combo Meal, and it was frozen and air-sealed to keep it fresh. Is that ridiculous? Absolutely. Is it also perfectly on-brand for Among Us? Also absolutely. Players have posted fan art, movie tributes, and now physics homework. The game captured imaginations in a way few titles do.

Platform-wise, the 2021 version of this story was already huge: Among Us was available on Nintendo Switch, PC, Android, and iOS, with PlayStation and Xbox releases expected that year. Writing in 2026, that 'expected' language is a little time capsule. The console rollout happened, and the game's reach only got broader. Still, the venting calculation remains a great reminder of why Among Us works. It is simple enough to pick up, silly enough to meme, and just deep enough that fans can spend an afternoon asking, 'Wait, how fast are these beans actually moving?'

So the next time you vent in Among Us, give your crewmate a little respect. They are apparently moving at 45 mph through a 150 kg hatch. That is not just a game mechanic. That is a superhero feat with a task bar.