The folks at Aggro Crab were feeling the fatigue.
Their previous game, the underwater Souls-like Another Crab’s Treasure, was their biggest undertaking since the studio was started back in 2019. While the creative action game had been received well by reviewers and players alike, it also took three years to make. A prototype for their next game, a sequel to 2020’s roguelike Going Under, was spun up almost immediately after wrapping that project. Everyone was excited at the prospect of revisiting the corporate world that had put the team on the map in the world of indie games. It was going to be bigger, it was going to be better.
But a few months into development, differences in creative vision caused the new project to lose its funding. It was a bummer, but Aggro Crab knew that things like these happen during game development. The team regrouped and spent months pitching the project to new partners. Despite their best efforts, no one felt like the right fit.
Worse, the prototype just wasn’t shaping up into something Aggro Crab felt proud of. Nothing was clicking. The situation was enough of an ordeal that the team started to feel resentful toward working on the game at all. A cosmic irony, considering Going Under’s theme of modern toxic workplace culture. Rather than push through the burnout, Aggro Crab ended up canceling the project.
Image: Aggro Crab/Landfall Games
Though it may not have seemed like it at the time, the failure may have been a blessing in disguise. In the aftermath, the studio was pushed to reconsider its priorities and approach to sustainability. You can’t run a studio running on fumes, as Aggro Crab had been operating for a while. A shake-up was in order.
Aggro Crab would start small. Nothing serious; ideally, it would work on something fun and silly. Something that could bring the spark back and make them remember why they’d spent their childhoods dreaming of making video games. The team thought of their friends at Landfall Games, and the way their recent hit Content Warning was the result of a month-long game development sprint during an offsite in Korea. The game had been a massive success, at a fraction of the development time for something like Another Crab’s Treasure. Aggro Crab pitched Landfall: What if they could tag along the next time their studio went to Korea?
They said yes. Aggro Crab decided they were going to lock in for a month, game-jam style. The goal? Come up with a commercially viable game in as little time as possible.
The excitement was palpable. The two studios had rented an AirBnb in Korea, and they spent the first day putting together IKEA furniture. Aggro Crab had sought this change of pace as a salve against weariness, but nonetheless, the group found itself pulling 15 to 17 hour days. Folks nearly forgot to take lunch sometimes. Still, things were coming together fast: within a week, the team had already settled on many of the micro game’s core mechanics.
“Our general routine was to wake up and go for coffee, come back and work until lunch, go out for some food and discuss the game, come back and work, go for dinner and discuss, and then come back and playtest and take notes for the next day,” Galen Drew, art director at Aggro Crab, tells Polygon.
This pace was possible in part because Aggro Crab wasn’t starting totally from scratch. Before the game jam, the team had vaguely conceptualized an open-world survival game. But when they actually started working on it, the kernel changed into the more fully-fledged idea of a slapstick game where a group of scouts were lost on an island.
Another piece that allowed the studios to move at breakneck speeds was the fact that Landfall was already experienced in making co-op multiplayer games at scale. Some things still had to be figured out, though.
“The first couple of weeks we were debating names at dinner basically every day,” Drew says. Some of the names they considered: Scout Adventure, Seagull Scouts.
“I’m pretty sure the pitch for Peak was as a joke over dinner at an Izakaya, where we kept saying ‘It’s Peak’ and eventually we just liked how Peak sounded,“ Drew says.
Once the month was over, the studios went back home and kept working on the game. Though they were having a good time, no one had grand expectations. Aggro Crab casually mentioned the new game in an update about the studio at large, and Landfall had shown it off during a livestream in April. There was no concerted marketing push compared to games like Another Crab’s Treasure, which had been featured on showcases like Nintendo Direct.
After a few months, everyone got together once again in Sweden to wrap things up. Peak was humbly released on June 16 for a mere $8, the same amount as its spiritual inspiration, Content Warning. Nobody expected what came next.
Peak sold a million copies in about a week, and everyone from major YouTubers to popular Twitch streamers were raving about the game with a name where the jokes write themselves. The meme aspect is deeply tied to the game’s visibility, but it would be a disservice to say people are buying it just to make an overplayed pun. As reviewers have noted in their coverage, it’s easy to fall in love with Peak’s procedurally generated mountains and its clever take on Breath of the Wild’s climbing mechanics.
Like in Zelda, there’s a stamina meter that goes down as players go up. The meter is affected by the conditions a player faces, like hunger or status ailments. Items can affect your stamina meter, as can animal encounters. Ultimately, though, it’s an engrossing co-op game that turns climbing into a survival puzzle. And it’s a hoot to watch others play, too.
The expressive character designs are like something out of the adventurous children’s show, Backyardigans, an aesthetic bent that lends itself well to Peak’s absurdist tone. Players aren’t just trying to get from point A to point B, they have to contend with possible shenanigans from their partners as well. A brave scout willing to carry their pals against all odds could either be an unlikely hero or the reason why everything goes down the drain.
To put Peak’s initial million into perspective: Another Crab’s Treasure sold about 500k copies three months, across multiple platforms, with an initial price point of $29.99. An estimated million people tried Another Crab’s Treasure on Game Pass, but the barrier of entry is much lower on a service with millions of subscriptions.
“We really didn’t have any idea it would sell this well so we were kind of blindsided,” Drew says.
“Every day was us frantically checking numbers and losing our minds,” Drew added.
If the studios weren’t ready for the attention, that was doubly true for the servers. As they scrambled to update the game and keep up with the issues players were encountering, a patch was put together and doled out — only to break the game entirely. Peak was being played by so many people that realistically, only a testing team several magnitudes bigger than the developers who made it could keep things stable. The patch was pulled, but the hype around Peak has only continued to mount.
Initially, no one had planned to keep working on Peak past release. It was supposed to be a diversion; something to get everyone’s creative juices flowing before taking on the next ‘real’ thing. In fact, Aggro Crab was already midway through a totally different small project around the time it released Peak with Landfall.
“It was really only once the game popped off that we sat the whole team down and talked through if we wanted to keep working on it,” Drew says. “We came out of that meeting with a resounding yes. I think it helps a lot that the core of the game was made to be fun to work on because we only ever really intended to have a fun month jam, so updating with new content is actually quite nice. We don’t have any official schedule for updates yet, but rest assured we are working hard on new content.”
Since release, Aggro Crab and Landfall have largely focused on making sure Peak runs smoothly. Localization is on the horizon, as is bringing it to platforms beyond Steam.
“It remains to be seen if we want to make game[s] on THIS short of a timescale for the foreseeable future, but we’ve been enjoying the freedom that comes from much lower stakes development since this pivot,” Drew says.
Though no one planned for Peak’s takeover — the amusing survival game has been on the top of the Steam charts during the platform’s summer sale — the game might well change the entire course of either studio’s future. Less than a month after release, Peak has sold an astounding 4.5 million copies.
“Even when taking into account the price difference and the fact that Another Crab’s Treasure is on consoles, Peak clears. Plus we don’t have investors taking a cut!”
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