Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has been a huge success, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. In a feature interview with PC Gamer, Paul Croft, founder of developer Mediatonic, has spoken about the team’s history–and the many, many games that led up to Fall Guys.
As PC Gamer points out, Mediatonic had worked on about 130 games before Fall Guys, including many web and flash games–here’s an incomplete list. In fact, it’s not even the first game the studio released in 2020–that would be picross narrative game Murder By Numbers. Other games they’ve worked on include Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess, Foul Play, Hatoful Boyfriend, Gears Pop!, Fable Fortune. The studio has also worked with Disney, Nickelodeon, Sega, Adult Swim, and other companies on major brands.
Croft talks about the studio’s first big success, 2008’s Amateur Surgeon–which was, on some level, much bigger than even Fall Guys. “That was a sort of huge moment for us,” Croft says. “It exploded online with 100 million players and that was a sort of turning point for us in terms of moving towards creating our own games as opposed to creating or porting games for brands.”
“We went from making flash games to making games on Myspace, then to making Facebook games, and then slowly expanded from there to console platforms and iPhones,” Croft says, reflecting on the studio’s journey as social gaming began to bloom. “It was easier to pivot and change direction because we weren’t locked into a three or four-year development cycle and we could keep pace with things.”
Croft notes that the studio started as two people, and has now grown to over 200 employees across four studios.
Fall Guys was first pitched internally in 2018 during GDC, Croft says. “Jeff Tanton, who’s our creative director and responsible for pitches in the studio, put a call out to the design team, and as part of that and I’m pretty sure part of his brief was no battle royales,” he notes.
He also notes, sadly, that because of social distancing it’s been hard to celebrate the game’s success. “We haven’t been able to get together and celebrate as a team with a giant party,” Croft says. “It’s been all online, which is what we have to do for now, but I’m looking forward to the day where we can all get together properly and celebrate the game.”
Fall Guys has just released its mid-season update, which has added a new huge hammer–which is, of course, called Big Yeetus.
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