After starting its humble life as an online Flash game called Meat Boy, which quickly built up a strong fan-base on Newgrounds, Team Meat revealed it would be bringing an improved version to PC and WiiWare in the form of Super Meat Boy (and now XBLA as well). Following on from the hands-on with Super Meat Boy last year, Cubed3 recently caught up with Ed and Tommy from Team Meat to talk a little more about the game, which is expected in the next couple of months.
Adam Riley, Senior Editor at Cubed3: What made you choose a piece of meat as your main character?
Edmund McMillen, Team Meat: Initially Meat Boy was more of an inside out boy. I just wanted to design a character that was very delicate, yet very fast and agile. I just called him Meat Boy because he looked like Meat!
AR: Once decided upon, did your imagination just go crazy with random ideas for extra characters?
Edmund: I had a few characters sketched out on paper a while back, Meat Boy and Dr. Fetus were a few of them. Spewer was actually another that I went on to make a game with as well. There are about seven more on that piece of paper that I plan on using in a future game, but they wont be popping up in Super Meat Boy.
AR: Have you considered giving Meat Boy some friends like the posh Sir Loin, or body builder 16oz Rump? Or using other meat related puns, like having Angus from Aberdeen?
Edmund: Christ no! *laughs*
Mike Mason, Reviews Editor at Cubed3: Characters from other games turn up as guests in Super Meat Boy, such as Braids Tim, Alien Hominids title character and Bit.Trips Commander Video. How did these inclusions come about?
Edmund: Video game crossovers are a difficult thing to do in mainstream games as there are a tonne of legal issues and business BS that goes along with doing a game with outside characters. In the Indie Scene this simply isnt a problem.
When we got the console deals with Meat Boy, we wanted to try to find a way to pay homage to the Indie Scene and kinda give back to it. Im sure a lot of people know who Tim and Alien Hominid are, but not many know who Flywrench, Gish and Ogmo are. Having Indie cameos in Super Meat Boy is our way of pointing the finger back to some great Indie titles that mainstream gamers wouldn’t have otherwise known about.
MM: Did any of the other developers give you limitations for using their characters?
Edmund: Thankfully, no.
AR: Are you able to tell Cubed3 readers a special secret about the game, like revealing one of the characters from other games that will appear in SMB?
Tommy Refenes, Team Meat: Thats top secret info…were letting characters trickle out naturally, like the discharge from my anus
Edmund: I actually mentioned a new one above!
MM: With The Behemoth on board, can we expect to see some of the Castle Crashers?
Tommy: Maybe
AR: Do you think SMB will help to revive the traditional run and jump platform game?
Edmund: I dont actually think it ever really died off; it just got a little bland. When we started Super Meat Boy, the main goal was to attempt to explore and revise a lot of systems in platformers that have grown very stale over the years. Stuff like removal of the lives system/continues, extremely fast re-spawn times, bite-sized level structure, real risk reward situations and pacing were all things we put a lot of time and thought into with Meat Boy.
AR: Were you ever worried about Nintendo’s reaction to the excessive amount of blood spillage included?
Edmund: No, Nintendo knew what Meat Boy was all about from the start. I think the blood spillage was actually a sell point for them!
MM: Has Nintendo asked you to pull back on anything so far?
Edmund: Nintendo has only asked us not to talk about Hitler in ads that have the Nintendo logo on them – that’s about it.
MM: The names acronym seems like an obvious pun on Nintendos Super Mario Bros. Was this chosen purely to try and goad Nintendo, to see how far you could push it in conjunction with the gore before you were censored?
Edmund: The initial reason why we added the “Super” was simply that the game was a big homage to the early video games of the 90s. Everything back then was super. When we realised that the games acronym was SMB, we knew that that is what we were definitely going to call it.
AR: You handed out a Meat Boy booklet at the WiiWare/DSiWare event last year, but will you be making more cool promotional material to hand out in the run-up to release?
Edmund: We made Issue 2 for the Game Developers Conference, and i hope to make Issue 3 if I have time around the release. We will also have some T-shirts printed in the near future!
AR: What was shown off was just a small sample of the one-player mode. What can people expect in the form of multiplayer?
Tommy: There is actually going to be no multiplayer on the Wii. Originally we kicked around some ideas, but we ended up trashing them and focusing more on the single player game. When we first announced Super Meat Boy for WiiWare, we were going to have 100 levels. Were now over 300 levels for the final game. It was the right choice by far.
AR: Will there be any fundamental differences between the PC and WiiWare versions?
Tommy: Just the resolution.
MM: How have you found working with WiiWare and its file size constraints?
Tommy: Frustrating…lets just leave it at that.
AR: What made you decide to release an XBLA version first and add extras in? Are you worried this will impact on the WiiWare versions sales?
Tommy: Honestly, the WiiWare version isnt gimped at all. It is exactly what it was going to be. The Xbox, being the more powerful machine with no size limits, just allows us to do more. If the Xbox version wasnt coming out, the WiiWare version would still be the same.
AR: Would you consider making a DSiWare version as well in the future?
Tommy: Nope! This is partially related to how I only like to make games once.
AR: Will there be any online content, such as leaderboards or co-op play?
Tommy: These things will not be on the Wii
AR: What sort of ideas do you have planned to help spread the word about your game?
Tommy: We have no plans at all!
AR: Will Meat Boy make a guest appearance in any other games? Would you like to see him eventually infiltrate Smash Bros. and Mario Kart?
Edmund: We are going to skip games and move right on to cameos in movies.
AR: Is Super Meat Boy 2 on the cards, or is working something fresh and new a preferred option right now?
Tommy: No Super Meat Boy 2…I like to make games once.
Edmund: Yeah, Tommy and I have recently talked about how easy it is to kill a game by making tonnes of sequels that do basically the same thing but a bit more (Tony Hawk, Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia, Mario Party, etc). Its not about juicing a brand for us. The next game we make will be nothing like Meat Boy.
AR: Finally, Press Play has told Cubed3 it would be happy to have Max from Max and the Magic Marker included in SMB and that they met you in the US recently. Is it too late to work with them to get the ginger-haired star in SMB?
Edmund: Maybe if they give us back our Direct-2-Drive trophy…
