I’m obsessed with Fall Guys. I’m also absolutely terrible at Fall Guys. For the uninitiated, Fall Guys is a multiplayer battle royale game, not dissimilar to the basic concepts of Fortnite and its ilk, but with one key difference: Instead of trying to kill each other you’re running obstacle courses, and participating in mini games to determine who is the final Fall Guy.
It’s dumb. It’s beautiful. It’s infuriating — and I can’t stop smiling.
In the game, 60 players are dropped into the competition and are slowly whittled down over a series of challenges. Sometimes you might need to run a trap-filled obstacle course, maybe you need to chase down other players and grab a tail off them. Perhaps you need to try and infect others with a virus … okay, that last one is a little much right now, but the rest are all PRIMED to be the next major sport.
How do we make Fall Guys a real-life sport?
Think back to the halcyon days of 2004. Everyone was in love with physical Japanese game shows like Takeshi’s Castle, which garnered massive popularity as Most Extreme Elimination Challenge on U.S. TV. After the craze things died down, only to see Ninja Warrior and American Ninja Warrior take over, and become legitimate sports in their own rights.
There still exists an inherent desire to see people fail at obstacle courses, but innately these tend to be singular affairs. By putting 60 people on a course at once we not only increase the danger, but also the fun.
What makes Fall Guys so brilliant is the variety of games. Not everything is a strict, bog-standard obstacle course. There are some tag-like games, some memory challenges, tasks that test reflexes. All of which have their own specific skill sets. To this end we have the perfect game built where we can have athletes, intellectuals, and ninjas compete for our amusement to have a sole survivor.
I’m sure TV networks are seeing the rampant success of Fall Guys and thinking “How do we leverage this?” The road map is clear. Get into pre-production now, because I can’t imagine a better way to welcome back group sports whenever Covid clears than seeing dozens of our citizens run through pointless obstacle courses for our amusement.
No comments:
Post a Comment