Peak was such a breakout hit that Aggro Crab’s Game Developers Conference talk was packed 30 minutes before it was scheduled to begin. Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kaman took that time to answer questions from a crowd eager to learn more about the biggest friendslop game of 2026.
One of the first things brought up was, why BBNO$? The artist behind Lalala and edamame made an unexpected appearance on the base of the mountain for a concert last year.
“We wanted to have a parody of a Fortnite concert, but what if it was bad?” Kaman said jokingly.
No one saw this concert coming, especially in a game like Peak. That surprise was compounded by the fact that the cross-promotion they had planned with Gen Z Eminem fell through. The artist had posted a TikTok challenge saying that he would quit music if he got more than a million likes. The video went far beyond that number, and his accounts went dark.
“I respect the bit,” Kaman said. The concert went out as Aggro Crab tried to frame it as his last performance, even though BBNO$ never really quit music.
Another question came from players curious why chess was added to the airport. It’s a slower, methodical game that often takes much longer than any pre-game lobby would allow. Nick had been playing chess with a Landfall developer in South Korea during development and wanted to add an activity for streamers to interact with in the game.
While the current version of Peak features a handful of animals, like spiders and beetles in the Roots biome, an earlier version of the game included a boar. It never made it into the final release.
The talk also covered familiar ground about Aggro Crab’s collaboration with Landfall in South Korea, where the team created the core of Peak in just a few weeks. It was a stark contrast to the near three-year period that the team took to make the studio’s previous game, Another Crab’s Treasure. That game left the team burnt out, leading to a much shorter timeline for Peak.
One major point of the talk was that the game’s concept was developed quickly. It took less investment and gave them more chances for success, because another project could take a similar timeline if this one didn’t pan out. Kaman urged the industry to shrink scope of their projects.
That truncated timeline is also why Peak is hard to update now. Kaman said that it’s “full of bugs” and that makes it difficult to jump into the code and fix things.
Kaman also spoke about how Breath of the Wild was a major inspiration, how the “everything” stamina bar was created on the third day of the trip, and how they intentionally named the game after a meme.
“We know what we’re doing, we know the memes,” Kaman joked. “We’re not stupid.”
