Mediatonic Creative Director Jeff Tanton recently posted on social media the story of how Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout came to be and shared a little tidbit about its name.
Tanton was 11+ years in the business already and pitching ideas was one of his responsibilities. He was developing internal pitches while also doing other things that keep the project moving. Others would have pitched in their ideas too and the first thing they had to do was to finalize its name.
The first name of the game was not Fall Guys. It was actually Fool’s Gauntlet and then it got changed to Stumble Chums. The second one sounded funny to most people, but they changed it again.
The final name it got was Fall Guys because it was the nature of the characters. As Tanton explains it, “… our characters that would fail for our amusement, but crucially always get back up again. Always. They would be heroic in their indefatigability.”
Tanton shared a lot on the Twitter thread including their pitch for the game. The developers’ idea was to make a 100-player battle royale, but they revised that during development (Thank God.) It was obvious that if it was going for the 100 players, it would become unstable and not fun to play at all.
The creative director also shared how they pitched the game to many publishers, about 10 of them in a certain event. It was a good thing that Devolver picked it up because they were in good hands. They were also friends with them from previous works like Foul Play and Hatoful Boyfriend.
Tanton closed the thread by thanking everyone involved in the development process and everyone who loved the game when it came out on PlayStation 4 and PC via Steam. He promises that there will be more content to come so there’s something to be excited about.