Trivia / Fall Guys

• Approval of God: Two fans have gotten the devs' attention thanks to their Fall Guys-related fan works: Matt "Hoggy" Hogben, who drew a Fall Guys costume concept every day for 365 days, and Umomofu, who makes a series of short videos on YouTube and TikTok where he goes about his daily life in a Fall Guy costume. As a reward, the devs made Legendary-tier costumes based on their characters.
• Colbert Bump: Within the first few days of the game releasing, several big named Youtubers and streamers, like Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, Game Grumps and others all played or streamed it, adding to the popularity of the game.
• Demand Overload: Matchmaking had to be shut down for several hours after the game launched on PlayStation 4 and Steam so the devs could improve the servers, followed by another downtime prior to the weekend to prepare for the potential influx of players. Giving the game for free (on launch day, no less) to all PS Plus subscribers had a much bigger impact than expected. It even led to people complaining about the game being unplayable and giving it negative reviews on Steam citing "broken servers", simply because the amount of players that tried to play at once was so unexpectedly high that the servers couldn't take it and required an upgrade.
• Development Gag: At one point in development, the game was going to be called Stumble Chums. In the final game, "Stumble Chums" is the name of an achievement earned by bumping into other players 1,000 times.
• Meme Acknowledgement: Mediatonic is fully aware of all the comparisons people have drawn between the game and the 2021 Netflix series Squid Game — especially between the show's fifth round of games and the Tip Toe round. This gets referenced occasionally by the official Twitter account.
• Milestone Celebration: For the 1st anniversary of the game (August 4, 2021), Mediatonic released a pattern titled "Happy Birthday!", as well as a crown costume with the same name. The costume crown has a unique feature that no other costume has: it changes color according to what color palette your Fall Guy is wearing. Both the pattern and the costume are sold for 10 Kudos, which are the cheapest items you can buy in the shop with Kudos. Crown rewards are also doubled for the entire day. A new show titled "Anniversary Party", featuring only Season 1 rounds, is released as well and made available for a few days.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content:
  • The Fall Guys Twitter account is the primary source for fan solicitation. Fans chose the nicknames of Big Yeetus for the spinning hammer of Season 1, Thicc Bonkus for the giant swinging spike log of Season 2, and Ringus Dingus for the pendulum bells of Season 3.
  • When asking fans for a nickname for the Season 3.5 update^note Season 1.5 was nicknamed "Big Yeetus and Anti-Cheatus", while Season 2.5 was "Fan Big Yeet Little", they settled on naming it after one person's exasperated plea: stop with the yeets name it anything else just don't include the word yeet please im begging you. Similarly, when asking for a name for the Season 4.5 update, someone suggested, "Just call it Dave," and the team decided to roll with it. The day which rolled out the "Updave", as it's now called, was dubbed "Thursdave" and "Day of the Dave".
  • A few months before the game launched, Mediatonic hosted a "Make A Fall Guy" competition, where anyone can submit their own Fall Guys costume designs to be added to the game. The winning entries are: Fish Tank Guy^note the final in-game variant is noticeably somewhat different from the winning design, Egg Guy^note later renamed as "Hatchling", Cactus, and Rainbow^note the latter actually a joint win of 3 players who independently came up with very similar ideas.
  • Another costume design contest was held by Mediatonic in partnership with CBBC's Blue Peter on November 2020. The winning entry is the Space Traveller costume, designed by Naomi. The final design of the costume has Blue Peter badges on the gloves.
• Pre-Order Bonus: Players who pre-ordered the game on Steam got an exclusive outfit for their character of Gordon Freeman with a Headcrab on his head.
• Prop Recycling: Fall Ball's golden egg is the same model reused from Egg Scramble, with a lower polygon count compared to the soccer balls in Fall Ball despite being enlarged.
• Referenced by...:
  • A Fall Guy can be found floating in the water as an Easter Egg in the game Ghostrunner.
  • One strip from Pop Team Epic features an image of a Fall Guy dressed as Pipimi.
  • Chapter 54 of the manga Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! has the characters play an obvious Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of Fall Guys, with bean-shaped cats racing against each other to grab a crown.
• Schedule Slip: The ports for Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X|S were initially planned for a Summer 2021 release, but were delayed to properly implement cross-play between all other versions. The Xbox and Switch ports will release almost a year after its initial launch date on June 21, 2022.
• Sleeper Hit: Before launch, the game had seen a moderate amount of success during its beta, which gave it a good word-of-mouth and a small fan-base excited for the full release. The announcement that the game would be available on PlayStation Plus' free monthly games lineup, however, blew the game's reputation up like a balloon, with players flooding the servers at launch. Sony later announced Fall Guys became the most downloaded PlayStation Plus title ever, in addition to seven million, non-free copies on Steam. Viewership of the game on Twitch skyrocketed, placing it in the top five most watched games, overtaking Fortnite. Mediatonic stated that the decision to make the game free for PlayStation Plus users was inspired by Rocket League, which had a similar astronomical success by using the same strategy.
• Similarly Named Works: The Frantic Factory round introduced in Season 2 shares the same name with a level in Donkey Kong 64.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game was originally pitched as Fool's Gauntlet and was planned to include 100 players per episode, but this was toned down to 60 after it was decided that having that many players made things too chaotic.
  • Concept art exists for rounds taking place at night, but it appears this never got past the concept phase prior to release. However, this concept would later be revisited for Season 4, where the sci-fi/Vaporwave aesthetic means all the new levels take place exclusively at night.
  • Similarly, Door Dash was originally designed with a Jungle Japes/Mayincatec look in mind, before it was changed to match the rest of the game's look. This concept would later be revisited for Season 5, with the final round Lost Temple using a similar design for its doors.
  • Wall Guys was originally intended to be a Season 1 round, before it was pushed back to Season 2. One of the early concepts for the round involves having players working together to stack blocks and create climbable structures, but the team decided that it would be asking too much of players, and the idea was scrapped in favor of climbable blocks of different heights.
  • The Season 2 hunt round Hoopsie Legends was originally named "Hoops Blockade", and it was first envisioned as a team round not unlike Hoopsie Daisy, before the devs decided to make it a free-for-all round instead.
  • The Season 3 team round Pegwin Pursuit was originally named "Chicken Chase" during development, and early versions of it requires players to grab onto walking eggs instead of Pegwins in the final release. The map layout of Chicken Chase largely remains the same as Pegwin Pursuit, although with Season 1's color palette instead of Season 3's.
  • Concept art◊ for Season 4's The Slimescraper reveals that originally, it had two paths that branch out from the starting line and converge just before the finish line. It is unknown why the layout was changed to the single-path version in the final release.
  • Power Trip from Season 4 was originally called "Territory Control", and before there were batteries, there were ideas for players to use art objects◊ such as markers and paint (and a pogo stick!) to color tiles, similar to Splatoon.
  • According to lead level designer Ben Nizan, Season 5's Bubble Trouble was originally created as a round named "King of the Hill". Presumably, the round would've played out just like the playground game of the same name.
  • The behind-the-scenes blog detailing the process of making the Rhinos reveals that the earliest experiments to create a hostile AI opponent in the game involve recreating the giant chicken from the E3 2019 trailer — the one that never actually appeared in the final release. The Rhinos were also originally planned to be introduced in Season 4.5 as giant retro-futuristic robots, but because of the time needed to get the AI behaviour working just right, it was decided to have them be pushed back to Season 5 and reskinned as Rhinos.
  • During the very early stages of development, a round based on the children's game "Red Light, Green Light" was considered, but was eventually scrapped because the devs reasoned that unlike in real life, in a game you can just let go of your controller or keyboard in order to stand still, thus removing much of the tension. However, the recent popularity of the drama show Squid Game, in which "Red Light, Green Light" is played for the first round, has made the devs consider taking another stab at the rejected concept.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Just three days after the Steam release, custom player names were disabled due to some people using inappropriate names and using exploits to break the UI. They would eventually be brought back with the integration of Epic Games accounts.
• Working Title:
  • The original one-page pitch for the game has the title "Fool's Gauntlet". "Stumble Chums" was also considered as a title at one point.
  • As noted above, some rounds have different working names than their final release: Hoopsie Legends was "Hoops Blockade", Pegwin Pursuit was "Chicken Chase", The Slimescraper was "Slime Climb 2", Power Trip was "Territory Control", and concept art for Season 5 reveals that Bubble Trouble was called "Bubble Poppers" at one point.

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