Banana Game

The wildly unexpected success of Banana on Steam came with plenty of surprises—and some bizarre moments. We asked the devs to share their most unforgettable experiences working on this game phenomenon. Here are the top craziest stories, straight from the team behind the bananas:

1. The “Accident” of Banana Drop

Sky:
When we started this, we had no experience whatsoever with Steamworks and how it worked (sorta we still don't haha), so we had to learn somehow. Then came the test nanas, bananas that came out of the blue, dropping to everyone because we were testing how to drop bananas to people who have had x amount of time played in the game. We tried to fix it, but we couldn't remove it, since the "damage was done", it didn't change anything, just that a certain amount of people got the items and we were still testing so we didn't expect people to instantly get it. It's sort of a life lesson even to this day. If you don't know how it works, break it or deconstruct it until you understand it.

2. Bananas, Bots and Steam Tricks

Sky:
The length in which people go to, to get "free stuff" on steam. The main goal of the game, from what I recall, was to get items more frequently than the others that were around at the time. I believe in that regard we hit the jackpot plus the name was easy to register, because who doesn't know what a Banana is, since then the name on steam, in my eyes, has become more of a game/gimmick, as people call it, rather than a fruit. People make tons of bots, we certainly don't actually know 100% how many there are, but we know there are a lot, just to get bananas, and that is really "bananas".

3. The value of Bananas

Sky:
Rarity of online items has no meaning if there's no use to it. We're still, in a way, learning this "quote"/how to give meaning to our items/skins, we can add scarcity to them but if there's a bunch of people farming them, there needs to be a certain limit to either how many people can get a certain item and/or how many times that item can drop. The usefulness of the item has to be enticing for people to use it, removing it from their inventory, for example a "on use" key, that is consumed when used, or a capsule, like we currently have. If there's no such use, more than just these 2 examples, the streams of input of said item, will make the market of that item explode, if every monkey has many bananas, bananas are not valuable.

4. From Banana Jokes to Banana Economics

Fuzu:
When I joined the project, I couldn’t believe it — it was actually about bananas… and there was a huge community behind it!
But nothing prepared us for the moment we hit over 900,000 concurrent players. When we tried to start logging all users, it felt like a massive DDoS attack — we just weren’t ready for that kind of traffic. And to make things even crazier: Razer contacted us for a banana skin collab, and some bananas started selling for $250 on the marketplace. Yes, banana skins.
The weirdest part? How serious this banana game became — with a real economy, bots, and growing markets. Today, some bananas are listed for over $1,300.

5. The Craziness of Contacts

O’brian:
A kid once asked me for a banana to get to Palworld because his mom wouldn’t let him use her card. He thought it was a smart workaround.

Some people treat me like a celebrity in Discord DMs. One of them said, “OMG I’m talking to a Banana dev!”. It was funny!

One guy kept collecting Steam bans like achievements, then begged us to ban him in-game too. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, apparently.

6. The Moment It All Got Real

Outrem:
At the beginning, we thought Banana wasn't nothing too serious, until this one morning where me and Fuzu were in our previous job as colleagues, and we received the news about the first month where the game really got "real proportions"...I remember being in a meeting and receiving the news and Fuzu was also in a call and we just looked at each other in the eyes at the same time without being able to say anything about it! That was really funny! But also any time we had a big one coming like when Forbes covered the game the first 2 times, I really got excited about it, it felt amazing to see!

Got a wild Banana story of your own? Share it with us! 🍌