Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is a platform game created by Team Meat, the two-person collaboration of designer Edmund McMillen and programmer Tommy Refenes. It first launched on Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade on October 20, 2010, before arriving on Windows later that year. Its deliberately severe level design expanded ideas from Meat Boy, a 2008 Flash game McMillen made with Jonathan McEntee. In the larger game, the title character is a small, red, skinless cube of meat; every surface he touches receives a visible blood smear. Dr. Fetus, a fetus in a glass jar piloting a mech, kidnaps Meat Boy’s girlfriend, Bandage Girl. Meat Boy crosses stages to rescue her, while the game’s cutscenes frame Fetus as his recurring antagonist. The campaign is organized around named worlds including The Forest, The Hospital, The Salt Factory, Hell, and Rapture. Each principal world has standard “light” stages and more difficult “dark” counterparts; completing a light level quickly enough unlocks its dark version. Boss encounters punctuate several worlds, including fights against Little Horn and Dr. Fetus. The controls are built around running and jumping, with a run button enabling Meat Boy to build speed and alter his aerial movement. Death is immediate, but restarts are nearly instantaneous, and a completed level can replay every failed attempt simultaneously. This replay is especially conspicuous at the end of a stage, when the game shows all of the player’s prior runs racing together toward the goal. Warp Zones offer hidden retro-styled challenge stages, and collectible bandages unlock playable characters. The roster includes characters from other independent games, such as Gish and Alien Hominid. Super Meat Boy was published by Microsoft Game Studios for its initial Xbox Live Arcade release, while Team Meat handled later versions. The game became a prominent subject of Indie Game: The Movie, the 2012 documentary that followed McMillen, Refenes, Phil Fish, and Jonathan Blow during indie-game development and release pressures. Team Meat later made Super Meat Boy Forever, an auto-running sequel whose development history included a change from an intended mobile release to a broader multiplatform project. Beyond its original release, Super Meat Boy was ported to macOS and Linux, then to PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch. Its soundtrack was composed by Danny Baranowsky, whose music had also appeared in McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac. The game uses a map screen to track world progress and accessible bandages for players to collect.