During a recent TechRadar interview, Fall Guys lead game designer Joe Walsh said the dev team at Mediatonic is currently toying with the idea of retrieving an unused minigame from the cutting-room floor. And it’s all thanks to Netflix’s latest original series, Squid Game.
Squid Game, written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-hyuk, concerns a deadly, 456-player competition that promises to pay a single winner enough money to escape their crushing debts. Intended to be an allegory on modern-day inequality, Squid Game’s similarities with properties like Battle Royale and The Hunger Games (not to mention the entire video game genre those properties ultimately inspired) has made it a hit among viewers.
While Fall Guys’ world and themes aren’t half as sinister as Squid Game’s, its premise allows for a lot of overlap. Take Red Light, Green Light for example, the well-known children’s game which takes up much of the show’s first episode. While developing Fall Guys, Mediatonic also considered its own version of Red Light, Green Light that ultimately never saw the light of day. With Squid Game now dominating the cultural zeitgeist, Walsh feels the time is right for revisiting the unused concept.
“Within a video game, there’s something about movement,” Walsh told TechRadar. “[I]n real life it’s very hard to stay still, but in a video game, you just put your controller down. And so, at the time, I think we were like, ‘We’ll never do Red Light, Green Light, it doesn’t make sense.’ But now, seeing how popular Squid Game is, I’d love for us to have another crack at something like that and see if we could do it in Fall Guys.”
Fall Guys has enjoyed several seasons of new content since launching in August 2020, some of which was even branded with crossover appearances from franchises like Among Us, Nier: Automata, and Godzilla. A collaboration with Squid Game, whether officially or just via homage, wouldn’t be the wildest thing to happen to the bouncy battle royale. In any case, it’s cool to see Mediatonic recognize the non-gaming media to which the genre owes so much.