Fall Guys, the battle royale party game in which dozens of beans try not to fall over, has proven to be the breakout success of the summer. A week after launch, publisher Devolver digital confirmed that the game had sold over 2 million copies on Steam, with some estimating it had been downloaded over 8 million times on PS4. But Fall Guys‘ path to success had humble beginnings. In fact, Fall Guys‘ pitch to publishers started with gifs of a cult-favorite Japanese game show named Takeshi’s Castle — and the rest is history.
In a lengthy thread on Twitter, Mediatonic creative director Jeff Tanton explained in great detail the process of putting a pitch together for Fall Guys. Tanton describes how Fall Guys came together surprisingly fast, starting with a one-page internal pitch for Fool’s Gauntlet from lead game designer Joe Walsh. The team took that one page and built a pitch deck, a presentation usually made in PowerPoint, in 24 hours. Mediatonic was just that excited about the possibility.
Tanton even shared some of the first Fall Guys concept art that was put together for that pitch deck, showing how consistent Fall Guys‘ design was even from the beginning. The art even featured a prototype version of Fall Guys‘ bean characters, top-heavy and with clumsy arms just as they are now. There was even a piece of art showing a prototype Fall Guys level that contains some features currently seen in-game, including a seesaw.
Eventually, Tanton gets to the actual pitch for Fall Guys. He describes pitching to 10 different publishers during GDC 2018 and how nervous he was, even with Devolver Digital who Mediatonic was friendly with. But Tanton explained that he started the Fall Guys pitch with two slides full of gifs from Takeshi’s Castle, which both cut through everyone’s nervousness and sold the concept of Fall Guys perfectly well.
For those unfamiliar, Takeshi’s Castle was a game show in which regular people would go through stages of obstacles and challenges. The players would often fail miserably, which was what made Takeshi’s Castle so unique, fun, and hilarious. Other TV shows like Wipeout also capitalized on this concept, and it’s the same idea as Fall Guys, only Fall Guys evolved it into a battle royale type of competition. It’s so smart it’s a surprise no one else made something similar first.
The full thread from Tanton is well worth checking out. It includes several anecdotes about how certain pieces of Fall Guys came together, and it’s just rich, in general, with excitement over what the team accomplished and how happy he is over Fall Guys‘ success. It’s astonishing that Fall Guys was made in just two years, but when it’s clear how excited the games’ developers were for it, it’s much more understandable.
Fall Guys is available now on PC and PS4.
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