It's no secret that Peak, the chaotic multiplayer climbing game, was made quickly during a game jam, with the full release coming just five months after ideation. Towards the start of that process, The Legend of Zelda was a big influence, before the central mechanics actually came into view for the team at Aggro Crab and Landfall.
"Day two, [there are] ones working on this climbing mechanic from like, Breath of the Wild, so we can climb anything, and that's looking really exciting, right?" Nick Kaman, Aggro Crab co-founder, recalls during a GDC 2026 talk attended by GamesRadar+. "Meanwhile, our team is kind of finalizing the scout design."
The idea, it seems, was to make a whole game based on the climbing in Breath of the Wild. Not a bad notion. But on the third day, "everything changed," says Kaman.
"This is our best idea ever," he explains. "Basically, you get afflictions like hunger, injuries. Items carry weight, and they all take up spots on the same bar that lowers the amount of stamina you have for that entire amount; this solves every design problem you could ever think of."
They keep pushing on this central concept, creating a proper prototype by day seven. This includes multiplayer, the physics, and several other facets that'd remain in the finished game. "At this point, the game kind of made itself," Kaman adds. "The whole game is just the client, the wall, and the stamina bar preventing you from getting onto the wall. So we all really clearly understood what this game was about."
As long as they centered on the wall or the stamina bar, ideas were free-flowing, leading to a massive creative buzz as the devs excitedly put together what we'd come to know as Peak. "It was a beautiful time," he states. Honestly, I can think of nothing more peak than that.
