About Gang Beasts

Gang Beasts is a silly multiplayer party game with surly gelatinous characters, brutal slapstick fight sequences, and absurd hazardous environments, set in the mean streets of Beef City.

Customise your character and fight local and online enemies in the melee game mode or fight with friends against the gangs of Beef City in the gang game mode.

Gang Beasts is made by Boneloaf, a small independent game studio making a series of experimental multiplayer party games.

History

Boneloaf was setup by three brothers (James, Jon, and Michael Brown) to make games and toys informed by an adolescence spent watching bizarre Filmation and Hasbro cartoons, playing multiplayer arcade and console games, and drawing silly characters.

For three years members of the company prototyped a series of experimental games working from geographically remote locations or meeting for game jams when members could take time off from their individual work and education commitments, a number of these prototypes were built with iterations of a custom procedural animation framework.

In late 2013 a basic punch mechanic was added to a high fantasy game prototype to test if it could be adapted to make a mêlée fighting party game similar to Capcom's Final Fight, Sega's Streets of Rage, Konami's Crime Fighters, and Taito's Double Dragon games.

In mid-November of 2013 the company committed to making the mêlée fighting game prototype their first commercial game (giving it the working title of Gang Beasts to conform with the naming scheme of other game prototypes). On the 11th February 2014 Boneloaf showed Gang Beasts publicly for the first time at the TGDN x Animex event in Middlesbrough (UK), an event organised by the Teesside Game Developer Network (now called Game Bridge) for the Animex International Festival of Animation and Computer games.

The first public pre-alpha build of the mêlée fighting game was published through IndieDB.com (an online independent game development resource) on the 14th of February 2014 concurrently with a Steam Greenlight submission. The game was greenlit by the Steam community on the 4th of March 2014 with a significant number of votes from the Giant Bomb and Nerd³ audiences. In late March 2014, a month after Gang Beasts was greenlit, three members of the company started renting a small room in a gallery in Sheffield (UK) to work full time on Gang Beasts. In June 2014 the three members of Boneloaf were joined by friend and illustrator Jason Pugh.

Since showing at the TGDN x Animex event in Middlesbrough in February 2014, Gang Beasts has been played at numerous local and international gaming events including A Maze Festival (Berlin, Germany and Johannesburg, South Africa), E3 (Los Angeles, US), EGX and EGX Rezzed (London, UK and Birmingham, UK), Fantastic Arcade (Austin, US), Gamescom (Cologne, Germany), Feral Vector (Hebdon Bridge, UK), GDC (San Francisco, US), IndieCade (Culver City, US), Insomnia (Coventry, UK), PAX (Seattle, US), Screenshake (Antwerp, Belgium), and Wild Rumpus (London, UK and San Francisco, US).

On December 12th 2017, Gang Beasts was released on Windows, MacOS, Linux and PlayStation 4. This was followed by a release on Xbox on 27th March 2019, and then the Nintendo Switch on 7th October 2021.

Boneloaf have also worked with independent development teams from Coatsink, SuperGenius, and Ruce on specific game content and systems. The title was initially published by Double Fine Presents until May 2020, when Boneloaf took over full publishing duties, with Skybound Games publishing Gang Beasts in physical form.

The company name, Boneloaf, comes from a misnomer we use to refer to the hunks of collectable meat in classic arcade and console games.