There’s an incredibly high chance that the moment you started a run in Peak for the first time, you immediately ran to a strange green plush known as Bing Bong, which survived the plane crash. If you’re anything like me, this then continued to happen each run until you realised that bag space was super valuable and you didn’t want a plushie taking up room for items that would inevitably save you later down the line.
Even after being thrown off the side of a mountain time and time again, Bing Bong became an icon for Peak, and ended up giving some players a pretty wild experience at the start.
Streamers were talking to the plush and hearing him respond, or he was miraculously appearing again once scouts had thrown him away. But, there was no explanation as to why. We even went as far as reaching out to Aggro Crab and Landfall to get any sort of comment about why Bing Bong was supposedly talking, but didn’t hear back.
At long last though, in a reel posted to the Aggro Crab social media pages, the process of “Bing Bonging” people has finally been explained. As it turns out, the devs were in fact joining games and talking to players through the plush. If you were publicly sharing your game, such as through a livestream, the devs could join through the plush and talk back to you. Which probably explains why I never got the response I was looking for in a private game and just seemed a bit unstable confiding in a random plush I’d just pulled from a plane crash.
The reel goes on to explain why devs decided to join games through its mascot: “It was really funny and a creative way to connect with the community.” However they went onto explain “We removed this feature mid-June, so if you are seeing anyone claiming that the devs are joining them through Bing Bong, or any other way, they are full of sh*t. So yeah, Bing Bong was sentient, but not anymore, and we can’t join anyone’s private games.”
Unfortunately, Bing Bong’s time as a living being has come to an end. But, that doesn’t give you an excuse to leave him out of your next adventure. After all, if you want to be the best Scout around and earn every badge, you’ll need to make your way to the peak with Bing Bong stashed in your bag one way or another. Just don’t expect any thanks when you do finally free him.