Fall Guys' Yellow Team

Submission 14,425

Part of a series on Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. [View Related Entries]

About

Fall Guys' Yellow Team refers to a series of memes which imagine the randomly-assigned Yellow Team in the battle-royale video game Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout as the worst of the four team options, with players who end up on the team being bound to lose. The jokes partly reflect the tendency of players on the red and blue teams to gang up on yellow team in three-team games.

Origin

On August 4th, 2020, the battle royale video game Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout was released for PC and PlayStation 4.^[1] Some of the rounds (mini-games) within the game divide the players into two to four teams, with red, blue, yellow and green being the available options. As of August 26th, 2020, the team rounds include Team Tail Tag (four teams), Egg Scramble (three teams), Hoarders (3), Rock n' Roll (3), Hoopsie Daisy (3), Fall Ball (2) and Jinxed (2). In the three-team mini-games, players have sometimes employed the tactic of ganging up on the one team to ensure the victory for the other two.

The earliest memes about Yellow team being the worst option between the teams appeared prior to the game's release during the beta period. On August 1st, 2020, Redditor^[2] Inmiscuidor posted the earliest found meme referencing this in /r/FallGuysGame subreddit, gaining 70 upvotes in one month (shown below, left).

Following the game's release, more discussions of yellow team being the worst option were posted in /r/FallGuysGame.^[3]^[4] On August 5th, 2020, Redditor^[5] LordTimcedog posted the earliest viral meme referencing the subject which gained over 2,400 upvotes in three weeks (shown below, right).

Spread

Following the release of the game, multiple viral memes referencing players' inability to win when playing on yellow team were posted in the subreddit. For example, a Dick Flattening meme posted by Redditor^[6] -HeHateMe on August 7th, 2020, received over 1,600 upvotes in three weeks (shown below, left). A same-day I Diagnose You With Dead meme by Redditor^[7] citruspaint received over 840 upvotes in the same period.

On August 10th, 2020, Fall Guys's official Twitter^[8] account joined on the meme, tweeting "Tag someone who gives off strong YELLOW TEAM energy." The tweet received over 1,200 retweets and 29,300 likes in three weeks (shown below, top). In the following weeks, @FallGuysGame tweeted multipled jokes about yellow team.

Starting on August 11th, 2020, jokes about yellow team gained traction on Twitter, inspiring memes and fan art.^[9]^[10] On August 18th, @FallGuysGame tweeted^[11] a screenshot of a Slack conversation between the developers, promising to delete yellow team if the tweet gains over 1 million retweets. The post received over 218,200 retweets in two weeks (shown below).