Fall Guys is good, but a game from over a decade ago did it better...
Since it’s release just over a month ago, Fall Guys has become a smash hit. 24 hours after it’s release on PS4 and Steam, 1.5 million players were already knee-deep in their own pellet-shaped corpses. It’s even overtaken League of Legends as the most watched game on Twitch at 29.3 million hours just 3 weeks after it’s launch.
What makes Fall Guys immediate success even more impressive is that it is a completely new ip; this isn’t a sequel that had a fanbase before it’s release, like a new Halo or Mario Kart. It also isn’t the type of game that’s normally an overnight hit. FPS games like Apex Legends have an advantage; there’s an enormous fanbase behind the FPS genre, but “Party Platformers” just don’t have that kind of weight in the fanbase behind it.
So why is Fall Guys such a smash? I’ve been thinking about it, and believe it’s a few different factors that blended together into the perfect, rainbow-colored storm I personally can’t stop playing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that everything that makes Fall Guys so likable has been done better by another game.
Over a decade ago.
We’ll get to that, but first I want to talk about the 3 major factors I believe helped Fall Guys find such massive success. Each on their own may make a pretty successful game in their own way, but when put together there’s potential for an overnight phenomenon.
Fall Guys was free at launch.
This first point is only partly true; it was free on PS4 for the first month of it’s release, as long as you were a Playstation+ subscriber. If you weren’t, it cost $20(but you also couldn’t play the game without subscribing, so that price point seems null this first month). On Steam the game was also $20.
This gives the game a huge head start in terms of a player base. PS4 is easily the best selling console this generation, and making the game initially free on that platform opens a floodgate of people who might not give the game a try otherwise. It’s one of the practices Playstation has tweaked from Xbox’s Live service; free games every month. It pays off in a big way- maybe more for gamers than Microsoft or Sony. But this month, Mediatonic and Devolver Digital are the ones reaping the rewards. Fall Guys is the most downloaded Playstation+ game ever.
Fall Guys being free is kind of an easy answer for it’s success. People are much more likely to try a game if it’s free. And while other free-to-play games have found immense success, there are plenty more that just never became a sensation the way Fall Guys had. Which brings me to the 2nd major factor for it’s success…
Fall Guys is a battle royale game.
Again, this seems like an easy answer. Battle Royale games are the new normal for online multiplayer games. Fortnite and Pubg took the ball and ran with it, Apex Legends built on that success, and already huge ip’s like Call of Duty followed suite. The difference is in the genre.
A battle royale style game that isn’t an FPS is a new idea in of itself. Shooters are practically built for that style of game; throw a ton of players into a space, and let them go nuts. It just doesn’t work as well for other genres of games. You can’t have a 60-player game of Animal Crossing or Zelda: Breath of The Wild. The games aren’t built for so many players interacting with those worlds at one time, and the games would suffer for it.
Enter Fall Guys, which turns the player count into something comical. Watching 60 players bumping into each other, tripping over one another, and shoving each other into slime only works because there’s so many players. That’s probably part of why the “Race” minigames are only played while there are still at least half of the players still in the game; the chaos and frenzy of dozens clamoring for the finish line is much more amusing than only 8 players. It takes what could ruin a platforming game and turns it into one of it’s unique strengths that other battle royale games don’t have; hilarious calamity.(*)
Fall Guys is fun to watch.
Fall Guys is simple; you run, jump, and dive your way to victory. It isn’t complicated. There aren’t loadouts, classes, items to equip, sidequests with deep stories to keep up with. Watch the game for 30 seconds, and you get it. Combine that with it’s bright colors and comedic physics, and you have a game that’s pretty fun to watch! And streamers learned this quick; overtaking League of Legends in any sense is no easy task, but Fall Guys became a sensation in the streaming business on top of the gaming industry.
So much of a sensation, in fact, that businesses not involved with games at all wanted in. They wanted their brands in the game as skins, and were willing to pay for it to happen. It quickly became a bidding war, but Fall Guys turned into something wholesome. Whoever donated the most money to the Special Effect charity would have their own costume in game.
For what it’s worth, the Fall Guys social media accounts are entertaining all on their own. So in the end, the game is a trifecta of entertainment; playing the game, watching the game, and as 2020 as it sounds, in it’s social media.
Fall Guys was free at launch, it was a trendy genre of game while being it’s own style, and it’s as fun to watch as it is to play. Each of those on their own wouldn’t propel it to the stardom it has, but when you put those three factors together, it creators something special. And other games have done it, too! Fortnite could be the most obvious example; free to play on many different systems at launch, it essentially put battle royale style games on the map, and it was a streaming juggernaut.
But one game found success thanks to those three factors earlier. Like, way earlier. And as I thought about Fall Guys and what made it special, I kept being reminded of a game from a decade earlier.
1 vs. 100 almost feels like a fever dream to me. It was in it’s heyday while I was in college, and while I was too busy to play it as much as I would’ve liked, it stuck with me even 11 years later. It was so ahead of it’s time, and some of it’s key features still haven’t been done again in games, at least not on the same scale. Pretty weird for a game based on a TV gameshow to be so innovative, especially when online games had only just to found their groove and set their standards in stone.
The game was simple; one player(The One) answers questions alongside 100 others(The Mob). If the One loses, the game is over and the Mob split the winnings. If the One answers correctly, everyone in the Mob that answered wrong is eliminated, and the One continues answering questions. The One can walk away with a hefty chunk of change if they’re smart enough. In the videogame, there’s another group of players; The Crowd, who is everyone else online playing. Could be over hundreds of thousands of players(sometimes it was!), and the better you answered questions in the Crowd, the more likely you were to be selected to be in the Mob.
So how is 1 vs. 100 similar to Fall Guys? On paper, they seem to be polar opposite games. If you look at what I talked about before, however, about what makes Fall Guys succeed, you’ll see the big ideas in both are very similar.
1 vs. 100 was free to play, an easy similarity to spot. And today that isn’t as big a deal, but in 2009, this was a much more innovative idea. Free to play mobile games weren’t the gigantic market that they are today, and downloadable games on consoles hadn’t really broken through quite yet. I remember being pretty confused at a game of this scale being free.
Next point; 1 Vs. 100 was a battle royale game before that was even a term used in video games. Not only that, it was on a massive scale! Thousands of players in one game, if you include the Crowd. It even showed the percentages of who answered how, so you felt like you were involved even if you were in the group of thousands. The One also had lifelines if they didn’t know the answer, such as “Trust the Crowd”, where everyone’s answer really made a difference! I’ll admit that saying it was a tens of thousands battle royale in a single game is a stretch, but it had this monumental feeling to it that I haven’t felt in a game since. I honestly get that feeling more at large sporting events(though it’s obviously been a long time).
The final point is arguably the most important. 1 Vs. 100 was fun to watch, and that makes sense; it was a tv gameshow first! And like most gameshows that revolve around trivia, everyone whos watching is going to yell out answers from their living rooms. Trivia games just attract that sort of participation. So whether you’re actually playing or watching from the sidelines, you’re going to be involved. This helps the game or show stay in play more, when it becomes the focus of not just the player, but of everyone in the room.
This may be the only point that Fall Guys is stronger in than 1 Vs. 100. Fall Guys was a streaming powerhouse, and the entire Twitch community was watching. That’s not a market that was around when 1 Vs. 100 was around, and I wonder how it would’ve fared. It would’ve made for a more interesting stream, since you would not only be watching your favorite streamer playing, but you could play alongside them in the same game with thousands of others!
So, the similarities are there, and fun to look at! While I definitely don’t find 1 Vs. 100 to be the better game, I couldn’t help but think about it the more I thought about what made Fall Guys special. Even though I haven’t thought about the game for years, much less played it! And it seems safe to say I’ll never have that exact experience again, which is a shame. Lucky for me, this generation of games manages to capture similar feelings of old, forgotten games, just in a different package.
Happy playing!
(*)If you’re looking for a platformer that attempts to have multiplayer and hurts for it, check out New Super Mario Bros. Wii, or New Super Mario Bros. U. These games are horrendous with more than 2 players because the game’s basic rules and ideas aren’t built around 4 players, and the result is a chaotic mess that ends with everyone hating the other players.