The Fall Guys Guy: How a Community Manager Built a Jelly Bean Meme Empire With Inspiration From Fast Food

The zany jelly beans of Fall Guys’ unique battle royale game may have earned a massive following, but there’s something to be said for developer Mediatonic’s interaction with players outside of the game as well. The Fall Guys Twitter account has been a haven of memes, fan art, and fun interactions that have gotten players through even the worst server outages the game has faced, just as entertaining to follow as it is to play the game itself. Our sister site Game Revolution sat down with the Fall Guys guy, the man behind the Fall Guys Twitter account, Mediatonic Senior Community Manager Oliver Hindle. Hindle took off his Fall Guys persona briefly to get real with GR about the challenges of Fall Guys success, his inspirations behind how he runs the account, and how he makes the Fall Guys Twitter feel more “genuine” and less “corporate marketing.”

One of the biggest inspirations was mimicking the way certain fast food brands have started tweeting in first-person, shirking a professional persona to put character and personality behind the brand account. “I wanted to try and use a similar approach to the best fast food brands, and it seems to have worked really well,” Hindle told Game Revolution. “It’s funny that you see all of these big games tweeting in a really dry professional way and then I’m just there tweeting memes in first-person.”

His tactic has been to keep the Twitter account rather off-the cuff, instead of pre-planning everything he does. “I like to have a general strategy and an idea of what I want to tweet about… but the actual tweets, I just wing them as I go,” Hindle said. “I only tweet when I have something important, interesting, or entertaining to say. It ends up feeling much more genuine that way.” Devolver Digital and Mediatonic were supportive of Hindle’s strategy from the get-go, but have been even more on-board since its clear proven success. Fall Guys is a hit, not just in game, but in community too.

Bringing that game experience outside of the game itself is a huge piece of what Hindle considers good community management. “To me, good Community Management means extending the experience and value of a game beyond the game itself and into social media and real-life,” Hindle said. After all, Fall Guys is a game that is all about multiplayer, that’s just as much fun to lose and watch as it is to play and win. “You don’t just have to sell the game, but you have to provide enough value to players that they are willing to invest their time in engaging with your community.”

Connecting with the players has come through using Twitter like anybody else would. “I think that’s one of the keys to growing quickly on a platform — using it in the same way that normal users would, rather than like a brand trying to fit in,” Hindle’s words immediately call to mind the classic “how do you do, fellow kids?” meme with Steve Buscemi. Brands often try to forcefully dress up their brand as something it’s not to fit in, where Hindle’s work with Fall Guys has taken the approach of just being real and fitting in from the start.

Of course, it helps that the game itself is already “wholesome, colorful, and positive” which Hindle says “brings out the best in people” and makes his job interacting with the community easier. He wants to be clear, however, that his day isn’t just spent posting memes. “It would be easy to assume that I just sit on Twitter all day posting memes. I mean, that’s exactly what I do, but also there are also lots of things going on behind the scenes lol.”

What Hindle is doing is working. The game—and the Twitter account—has caught the attention of multiple other brands who all want in on the Fall Guys craze. KFC, Walmart, Konami, and more have offered up their own versions of unique cosmetics for the Fall Guys jelly bean people to wear, while fan art for a number of other bizarre crossovers pours in. Hindle retweets it all. “We also get a lot of Fan Art, which I love to see. I’ve always retweeted fan creations even when they tie into other games. I don’t think other game accounts usually do that, but if it looks cool, I’m going to retweet it!”

So what’s Hindle doing when he’s not posting jelly bean memes, making us all wish for crazy crossovers, or criticizing the yellow team for their inevitable failures? Honestly, probably sabotaging that near perfect run you just had in Slime Climb. “I’m only on 2 wins at the moment, both of which were live on stream! I’ve played the game a lot off stream too, but I mainly focus on sabotaging other players when nobody is watching me play lol.” Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Be sure to check out the full interview with Oliver Hindle on Game Revolution. You can pick up Fall Guys free on PS4 with PlayStation Plus through the month of August.