Five years ago today, 32 jellybean-shaped bipeds stumbled into our hearts. That’s right: on August 4, 2020, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout hit PS4 and PC, bringing the party game stylings of Mario Party to the dog-eat-99-other-dogs battle royale genre.
Like many of the 11 million players who bought a copy of the game (that’s just the PC version) within its first four months of release, I played Fall Guys seemingly exclusively in 2020. Just like Ice Spice only mattered in 2023 (sorry Ms. Spice), Fall Guys is a game that only really mattered in one specific moment before being quickly forgotten.
What made Fall Guys so perfect for 2020? Why did it break out so fast, and become irrelevant to the broader gaming community so quickly? Let’s take a look.
How The Fall Guys Have Fallen
The numbers don’t lie. Fall Guys isn’t completely irrelevant. At time of writing it is currently the 147th most viewed game on Twitch. It peaked at 1064 players on Steam in the last 24 hours. The game isn’t a phenomenon any more, but it still has an audience. It’s just that after being at the center of gaming in 2020, Fall Guys is now pretty niche.
Niche despite having a ton of licensed skins. In one video I watched from last year, the winner was a Buzz Lightyear bean.
I remember exactly where I was when I first played Fall Guys, like basically all games released in 2020. It’s a year where I understandably visited very few locations in the real world; video game tourism took on added importance. The games that launched that summer are indelibly recorded in my memory.
When I first played them I was cooped up and sweating in my poorly air conditioned apartment. Fall Guys reminds me of the couch where I spent so much time that year — basically all of my leisure time. That might not sound exciting, but when I think about Fall Guys I think about it (and other 2020 games) as a life raft.
Virtual Vacations From The Hellish Real World
2020 was a bizarre outlier year for video games and vice versa. While many industries struggled, video games felt bigger than ever. Unlike film, television, theater, or live music, video games don’t require an in-person component to create — at least not after their developers shifted to remote work. Games could keep going without losing too much ground. The result is that many people could turn to video games, and there was plenty to get excited about, even with a pandemic raging outside. In that miserable year, Fall Guys was a welcome, candy-colored escape.
It was far from the only multiplayer game to break out that year. An intense need for new stuff to keep the connection with your friends alive buoyed the Jackbox Party Packs, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Call of Duty: Warzone, Among Us, Phasmophobia, and many more games to massive success.
But that wasn’t why I played Fall Guys. While I may have played it entirely by myself, I think I liked it because it felt like Mario Party but without all the waiting. I didn’t have to sit there, bored, as I watched a Bowser bash into a die block and slowly amble around the board. I could skip right to the minigames. When I inevitably lost at one of them, I could hop right back in — now, maybe, with a cool new jumpsuit for my bean boy.
I don’t play a ton of live-service games, but the early pandemic years changed my and everyone else’s habits. I spent hundreds of hours in Hitman, ran over endless Master Chiefs in Halo Infinite, and stumbled my way through Fall Guys’ many obstacles. It was never my favorite game, but I look back on it fondly. In a year where we couldn’t travel, Fall Guys was a much needed vacation.
