The Complete History of Lethal Company.

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This is Binomi. I have prepared the history of Lethal Company by utilizing various sources, creating it as a guide. If you believe there is any incorrect information, please indicate it in the comments section.

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Who Is Zeekerss?

▶ Zeekerss is the developer and publisher of Lethal Company .

▶ Zeekerss has also made other indie titles such as It Steals, The Upturned, Drive Home, Dead Seater, and many others found on his Itch.io page.

▶ Additionally, he has created Roblox horror games like Light Bulb, Silent Dark, and They Breathe. Due to lack of developmental updates and Roblox engine evolution, those games are inactive and nonfunctional.

 The Profile Photo of Zeekerss 

What’s Zeekerss Real Name?

▶ Zeekerss's real name has not been publicly disclosed yet. It's likely that Zeekerss values privacy and aims to keep their online persona separate from their real-life identity. Just imagine becoming an icon among indie developers but not being able to share with your closest friends that you're the mastermind behind the game they've been playing and enjoying for months. Privacy can be challenging to maintain in today's digital age, considering the vastness of the internet and our dependence on modern technology. Nevertheless, all respect to Zeekerss !

Zeekerss's Roblox Development Journey.

▶ Though Zeekerss rarely grants interviews, tracking his evolution as a game developer and artist isn't difficult. Zeekerss has meticulously documented his entire journey on a YouTube channel he initiated on May 29, 2012.

https://www.youtube.com/@ZeekerssRBLX

▶ At the time of inception, he was merely 10 years old.

▶ The early content on the channel primarily consists of skits and montage music videos crafted with friends within Roblox. One notable instance is a three-minute scenario where a character representing Zeekerss informs his father, “I'm leaving Roblox... forever,” before slowly wandering off into the sunset while an instrumental piece by Cowboy Bebop composer Yoko Kanno plays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER6fxvmNkZk&t=123s&ab_channel=Zeekerss

▶ However, Zeekerss didn’t actually depart from Roblox at that point. Instead, he began experimenting with the platform’s game creation tools and releasing his own small, experimental games. The first, Dark Mansion, debuted in July of 2012, followed by a sequel a little over a month later. Although most of these games are now delisted or broken within Roblox, we can still catch brief glimpses of them thanks to Zeekerss's YouTube channel.

▶ Over the next four years, Zeekerss launched a total of 12 games on Roblox, each progressively increasing in complexity and ambition. A surreal side-scrolling adventure titled A Lucid Dream was released in 2014 and nominated for "Best Single Player Game" in the 2014 Bloxy Awards. Subsequently, Zeekerss delved into more side-scrolling ventures, but the following year, he seemed to have found his niche with 3D horror games. These included They Breathe (2015), Light Bulb (2015), and Silent Dark (2016), with the latter emerging as the most popular game Zeekerss released on Roblox, amassing over 5.4 million “visits,” in the platform’s parlance.

 A screenshot from "A Lucid Dream" 

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▶ Silent Dark marked the culmination of Zeekerss's Roblox development journey. In a November 2016 tweet, he expressed his reluctance to continue creating games on Roblox, citing concerns about their eventual breakage due to updates. He lamented, “One of the main things keeping me from wanting to make more games in Roblox is that they'll eventually all break because of updates. Silent Dark has broken like 5 times all because of updates and I keep having to fix it. I think A Lucid Dream's ending is broken too, ugh.”

 A screenshot from "Silent Dark" 

Zeekerss Moving From Roblox Development

▶ Zeekerss's transition away from Roblox development also provided an opportunity to start experimenting with more sophisticated tools. On his YouTube channel, he posted a series of teasers for a (still-unreleased) text adventure initially called A Dark Place To Hide, developed using Unity.

 A screenshot from "A Dark Place To Hide" 

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▶ At the same time, Zeekerss began posting smaller experiments on his itch.io page, including Too Many Asteroids, Drive Home, and Take Your Wish. While these titles might be more accurately described as “demos” rather than full-fledged games, they served as vital stepping stones that led to an evolutionary leap in Zeekerss’s approach to game design.

Zeekerss's itch.io Page [zeekerss.itch.io]

▶ By August 6, 2019, Zeekerss had officially opened a Steam page for his text adventure, now retitled Welcome to the Dark Place. Zeekerss would continue to release his next three games—It Steals (2020), Dead Seater (2021), and The Upturned (2022)—on both itch.io and Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1135700/Welcome_To_The_Dark_Place/

▶ It’s during this phase, beginning with the “arcade horror” title It Steals, that Zeekerss entered what we might call his “mature” period, in a manner of speaking. His art style was coming into focus (an ironic choice of words, perhaps, given its intentionally lo-fi feel). Content creators and streamers began taking notice of his work, and the level of attention on his games—while not yet at the level of his biggest Roblox hits—began growing rapidly.

▶ In some ways, catering to streamers was a deliberate choice by Zeekerss . The very first teaser for It Steals features what seems to be authentic audio reactions of players navigating the game’s spooky mazes and traps. Players can be heard nervously chuckling, screaming, and ultimately laughing at themselves when they inevitably fall prey to the game’s murderous monsters. Zeekerss paid close attention to how players might emotionally react to his game’s mechanics.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349060/It_Steals/

▶ After the game’s release in July 2020, Zeekerss posted a compilation of streamer reactions to It Steals:

https://youtu.be/YYuPFQbBBtU

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▶ Fear is a powerful emotion, and Zeekerss was getting better all the time at evoking fear with his games. His next title, Dead Seater, took the scares to yet another level. Another fun reaction compilation can be found here.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1570080/Dead_Seater/

▶ However, it was after the release of Dead Seater that Zeekerss had a revelation. As he tells it, he realized that he was no longer content with just making games that were scary. He wanted to push further and blend the scares with more unexpected emotions.

It was time to get scary-funny.

The Evolution of Fear

▶ “After making Dead Seater,” Zeekerss says, “I realized I was intentionally holding back a lot of my identity from my games, since I was so focused on making something scary. When I stopped confining myself to that one goal, my next game, The Upturned, suddenly became funny—in fact, my games had always been funny accidentally. But now, they could be funny and scary at the same time.”

 A screenshot from "The Upturned" 

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▶ According to Zeekerss , The Upturned is indeed a horror game, “but it's also a friendly game that actually wants you to be happy. It's completely disinterested in being a horror game on the surface level, but it's still able to use all the elements of horror just to have fun with you. In the end it wants to delight you instead of traumatize you.”

▶ Watching trailers for The Upturned, the new blend of humor and horror is almost immediately apparent in the character design, animations, and even the music. But beyond the stylistic changes, there’s also a noticeable step forward in overall visual fidelity—for lack of a better way to put it, this looks like a legitimate indie game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaoC9sCebHo&ab_channel=Zeekerss

▶ The game sold well and garnered more attention than any of Zeekerss's previous post-Roblox titles. However, his next project, his 20th game overall, would be even bigger, and it would incorporate everything he’d learned up until this point.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1717770/The_Upturned/

▶ On May 11, 2022, Zeekerss posted a video inviting his growing community to follow the development of his next game on his Patreon page:

https://youtu.be/icXWB-rjJ1s

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▶ Pitched as “a way to support me in making indie games long into the future,” Zeekerss gathered a small circle of dedicated fans onto his Patreon page, where—true to his word—he documented the development of Lethal Company with weekly journal entries offering extremely detailed insight into the game’s creative process.

▶ “Running a Patreon was the perfect excuse to keep a journal of my thoughts as my game development progressed,” Zeekerss says. “The Patreon development logs even captured a crisis back in late 2022 when I had to rediscover what the game was going to be and scrapped major amounts of content. I'm really proud that it was all recorded.”

▶ "Lethal Company" is a game that will be discussed for years to come, and having a resource like this documenting the twists and turns of its development is a blessing for game historians and anyone interested in understanding game development more deeply. It reminds me of the game dev journal that Jordan Mechner kept while creating the original Prince of Persia.

▶ Although Zeekerss made drastic changes to the game’s structure over the course of development, it’s striking—from my outsider’s perspective—how consistent so many elements of Lethal Company were apparent even from the beginning.

▶ One of the most interesting early posts captured Zeekerss's thoughts on the evolution of the game’s textures.

▶ “One notable thing that happened in the last couple weeks is that I learned a more advanced method of texturing objects, so stuff can look like this while having much less polygons,” he writes, before sharing the image below:



▶ “I am mostly happy about this,” he wrote on Patreon. “Only slightly scared by the fact that it will probably result in a drastic change to the look of my games moving forward.”

▶ Week by week, Zeekerss updated his small community on his progress. By August 4, 2023, he felt confident enough to start small-size playtests of the game—and even announced an imminent release date: Monday, October 23, 2023.

▶ True to his word, the game released on schedule.

▶ It peaked at around 611 concurrent players on that first Monday, growing steadily every day thereafter.

By the following Monday (October 30th), it was up to approximately 3,200 peak CCU.

The Monday after that: 12,220 peak.

The following Monday? 43,268.

▶ The growth accelerated. By late November, Lethal Company was one of the most popular PC games in the world.

▶ This was textbook hockey stick growth. Pure word of mouth—yes, fueled in part by influencers, but
clearly not dependent on any singular “takeoff” event.

Lastly

▶ Lethal Company continues to maintain its popularity and will likely remain in the minds for years to come. As fans, we will witness this development firsthand.

▶ As fans of all games, well done Zeekers !

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I hope it has been helpful. Have a great day!

Here are the sources I used while preparing this guide..

Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org]

IGN

STEAMCHARTS [steamcharts.com]

Push To Talk (MOSTLY!) [www.pushtotalk.gg]

[DocValentyne]

Light Bulb was always my favorite horror game. So it was a real suprise when i saw that it steals, upturned, AND lethal company were all made by the same guy around the time when LC got released. Also yes the reason its my favorite horror game is PURELY becouse of nostalgia but i dont really care that much

[Lethalpumpkin]

your useful :3