Breakout indie hit ‘Peak’ has been all the rage on Steam of late, and it turns out the mega-popular co-op climbing game was mostly made in just four weeks. As the developers put it, they simply “locked in.”
Every so often, a new indie game comes around that shatters expectations. From 2023’s Lethal Company to 2024’s Content Warning, and even the likes of R.E.P.O. most recently, these titles – often revolving around chaotic multiplayer situations – have blown up on the internet.
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Now, the latest game to replicate that success is Peak. While at first, it caught on for the humor in its name, thousands began to realize there’s real potential in the game itself. The idea is simple. Join up with friends online and climb a mountain together. With each day, however, there’s a new mountain to scale, meaning all-new challenges to overcome.
It’s become a smash hit on Steam, reaching a peak of over 100,000 concurrent players and has quickly sold over a million copies too.
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So, where did this viral success come from? Well, it turns out the developers hustled for the better part of four weeks to piece the majority of it together.
Peak is a breakout success, with the indie co-op climbing game selling 1 million copies in a week with almost no marketing
The game has gone viral because people can’t stop joking about the name pic.twitter.com/KCsrv160xp
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) June 22, 2025
Peak was mostly made in just four weeks
Amusingly enough, the motivation behind Peak stemmed “mostly from jealousy,” as studio head Nick Kaman told PCGamer. It was actually one of those aforementioned games, Content Warning, that spurred the team at Aggro Crab on.
The studio was on the verge of releasing Another Crab’s Treasure, a charming yet ever-so-punishing underwater Soulslike that took them over three years to develop. While the game did well for the team, seeing other projects like Content Warning gave them pause.
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Why spend over three years on a game for it to do decently, when “Content Warning was a much bigger success [and] one made in much less time,” as Kaman said.
LandfallWithout the success of Content Warning, we never would’ve had Peak.
Inspired by the very same trajectory, a handful of Aggro Crab developers packed their bags and traveled to Seoul. There, they plugged in their computers and well, “locked [the f**k] in for a month.
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“Basically any given moment was either working on Peak or getting food while talking more about Peak,” Kaman explained. “While it was pretty intense, it was also the most fun I’ve ever had working on a game.”
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Of course, the entire co-op experience wasn’t finalized in that stretch, but the majority of the game had indeed come together in the form we now see on Steam today. Evidently, their hustle paid off.
