Fall Guys by @mediatonic has been out two weeks now and in that time has smashed our modest, and then wildest expectations of success.

This is how the initial  @gosujoe pitch came about and why this moment means so much

In the 11+ years I've been here, pitching has been one of my responsibilities. So I'd be developing (or carefully knocking-back) internal pitches while also doing all the other things that keep projects moving and design teams supported in a studio

It is an awesome job. It also comes with a huge amount of pressure. Opinions are changing now, but the common consensus was that you had 2-3 events across the whole year to Make Business Happen - so you'd better be taking your best shot, because everyone else will be.

It's an obvious point, but Making Business Happen is the lifeblood of a studio. Things could be fine right now with your current project(s), but you're always trying to stay one step ahead and ensure a pipeline of projects so that everyone has work, everyone can be supported.

On top of that, you have the hopes of an entire (and in our case, ever growing) studio to consider.

'Business' is great.

'Business That's Creatively Fulfilling for Everyone' is what you're always chasing - and you try to land as realistically close to that as you can.

Cut to Jan 2018 - and I invite Joe Walsh ( @gosujoe) to brainstorm on a completely different internal pitch - something just clicked and he had his epiphany moment midway through.

I got the one-pager for "FOOLS GAUNTLET" a few days later

(as you can see, we went for a big round 100 initially, but revised that during development for a bunch of reasons - one of the clearest being that, over a certain size, the games stopped being readable or fun)

So Joe pitches a battle royale. The NERVE of this guy. I'd already said that the market was going to be saturated with Battle Royales in 2 years, so if there's one genre to avoid it should probably be this.

Then I read it.

I immediately forwarded it to one of our studio founders - so convinced of its greatness that I didn't even bother to include any explanation or preamble, or SELL (either that or I just hit send too early).

We began working up the pitch deck that afternoon.

Pitch decks are tricky. Without a playable prototype you've got to really think about how you're building up the idea of the game in your audience's heads. It's a balanced drip-feed of information, hype, faithfulness to the design, and often awesome art to paper over any cracks.

Fall Guys was the easiest deck to ever come together. As a designer you dream of getting that pure bottled-lightning moment; a unique, instantly understandable, and sellable idea - and Joe had basically nailed it. We had a skeleton deck ready 24hrs after the one-pager pitch

Enter Dan Hoang ( @danhoangart) our principal concept artist who'd been messing about in Blender and very quickly produced our proto-game characters and colourful obstacle-course in the clouds. It instantly looked fun, clean, understandable.

This image was super important for 2 reasons.

First, all great pitch doc images make you wish you had a controller in your hands. I took one look at this and wanted to play the game.

Second, the BEANS. Obviously just little capsule shapes Dan had thrown in but suddenly we realized the focus of this game was the competitors... not just the course

That's probably where 'Fall Guys' as a game title first appeared (RIP Fool's Gauntlet and 'Stumble Chums') - our characters that would fail for our amusement, but crucially always get back up again. Always. They would be heroic in their indefatigability.

As for the longboi-fallguy in the deck, it was based on a kidrobot "Yetiguy" vinyl figure Joe found in the studio. It was also an original  @thisisnevermore design (the UI artist on Fall Guys).

Even then we knew 'top-heavy' was important, these beans needed to fall real good

I pitched Fall Guys to about 10 publishers over a few days at GDC that year.

Pitches happens in hotel lobbies, in corners of bars, or occasionally opulent company suites. You have to be prepared to improvise on the fly - it's a combination of terrifying and exhilarating.

Devolver should have been the easiest, we'd worked on Foul Play and Hatoful Boyfriend and been friends ever since, but watching these people flll the room as I was setting up the AV shook me.

If they're friends... this could just be flat-out embarrassing for everyone involved.

Fortunately I'd loaded the first two slides of the deck with star-wipes into Takeshi's Castle gifs. I recommend everyone does this even if it has absolutely zero connection to the game you're pitching - really sets a tone.

Flash forward 6 months and after Business had Transgressed we were ready to begin development (and where I'm going to give a lighter touch on details as I don't want to steal potential GDC talks from the leads and team that actually made the thing)

I will call out some favourite moments though:

@dentist64's original Fall Mountain course. It's changed very little to the one you play today and it was our FIRST real Fall Guys stage. A shaky bot-filled version of this is what the good people at Sony first played.

The importance of @megralph joining the project midway through and wrestling a level pipeline into existence. She's had an impact on every single level on the game and was integral to ensuring we had the content at launch that we did!

The redesign of the Fall Guy at the start of the project ( @danhoangart again) Pre-prod art lead  @biskyns is still most proud of giving them butts. The moment of understanding that face-holes should be in the chest of 'big' costumes is a tiny, wonderful revelation

If you're wondering why the game looks good enough to eat, it's because art-lead  @B10n1c_Ch1mp picked a colour palette and treatment that was directly influenced by candy and sweet treats. The first time fully arted stages landed was joyous.

There were so many code challenges to overcome that picking a single one doesn't really do the rest justice. So instead, a small perfect anecdote involving  @AlexTheEngineer learning that we needed to have 'two' possible hidden paths on Tiptoe

He already had one path in place (and the rules surrounding its generation), and allegedly sat back to work out the code that'd have the path act smartly, bottleneck-ing and branching at the right moments.

(Allegedly) a few minutes later he claimed he'd solved it, and had - by just running his original path code twice instead of once. I'm pretty sure that's still the solution you see in the final game. I am a simple person and the elegance of this still pleases me

Finally, the PAX show we did before the world got locked down. We met so many people and had the first sense that we might be sitting on something special.  @oliverage24 worked the queue like a boss and ate nothing but fish and chips in various forms throughout the entire week

It's hard to imagine now but we had no idea whether Fall Guys was going to be a success. As a studio we've taken some tough knocks in the past and picked ourselves up again - there's a resilience and learning through that, a humbleness that I think runs through the studio culture

It also means we had a whole bunch of muscle memory around near-misses and might-have-beens, but not for 'completely unprecedented levels of success and attention'. When I say it was a shock I mean I spent the first week kind of numbly updating social media and shaking.

The  @fallguysgame team have done outstanding work, they all deserve to enjoy this moment. They've had the love and support of the wider  @mediatonic team throughout  - each working and creating and building amazing things. I'm so proud to call them my colleagues

Finally a huge thank-you to everyone who's playing and enjoying Fall Guys. It is, against all expectations, almost exactly the thing we pitched way back when - and I'm so glad you all seem to be consistently proving that we weren't completely crazy to get behind it.

There's so much more to come, and the team can't wait to share it with you all.

See you on the start line!