At the start of this month, Devolver Digital visited Mediatonic to talk about Fall Guys, the cute Battle Royale that has since surged to massive success. The video touched briefly on the inspiration behind the game, the way it was pitched, and featured a good look at some development related things. In a new tweet thread, Jeff Tanton has given a deeper backstory into how the game came to be.

Jeff is a Creative Director at Mediatonic and explains that in 2018, the initial idea for Fall Guys was pitched by lead game designer, Joe Walsh. As already known, it was to be titled Fool's Gauntlet. However, in the pitch document shared, it was revealed that there were to be 100 players. Winners wouldn't get a crown, instead, the winners would share a 1,000,000 gold prize pool. The gameplay was to have a focus on teamwork which shifts to backstabbing

Jeff explains that originally the studio felt the Battle Royale genre should be avoided due to the popularity resulting in the gaming scene being oversaturated with different types, but after reading the pitch he forwarded it to one of the Mediatonic founders. This resulted in a "pitch deck" coming together. This led to some concept art of how the game was envisioned to come together.

As you can see in the above images, the general idea seemed to be fairly similar to what the current state of the game is now, although characters look somewhat more...menacing. To be honest, that's understandable considering the character concepts used in the pitch deck concepts were based on a Kidrobot "YetiGuy" vinyl figure. The pitching to publishers took place, which Jeff explains took place during GDC 2018 and led to pitching it to Devolver Digital with a Takeshi's Castle GIF to start.

Development began, and Jeff calls out some favourite moments from production.

The incredible success of Fall Guys is something that has surprised Mediatonic, yet they remain humble through it. Jeff mentions how they had no idea how the game was going to be a success, and past knocks always led to them picking themselves up again. The thread ends with a thank you and the mention that more is still yet to come for the game.

Fall Guys is available on PS4 and PC at the moment, however, Mediatonic has expressed interest in bringing the game to other platforms.