Super Meat Boy - Development and Marketing

Development and Marketing

The original Meat Boy is an Adobe Flash game created by Edmund McMillen and programmed by Jonathan McEntee. The game was developed over a three-week period, and was released on Newgrounds on October 5, 2008. By April 2009, it had garnered over 840,000 views at Newgrounds, and 8 million overall. A map pack for the Flash version was released on December 8, 2008. McMillen began development of Super Meat Boy after Nintendo and Microsoft requested that he make a game for their download services, WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade, as they were impressed by the success of his Flash games Aether and Meat Boy. At the time, he was working with Tommy Refenes on a Flash game titled Grey Matter. Although McMillen initially pitched the companies a sequel to Gish or Aether, the pair decided to form Team Meat and work on an expanded version of Meat Boy instead. Team Meat also includes soundtrack composer Danny Baranowsky and sound effects designer Jordan Fehr. According to the developers, Super Meat Boy is "a big throwback to a lot of super hardcore NES classics like Ghosts'n Goblins, Mega Man, and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2", with the plot written as "a mash-up of every videogame story from the early 90s". The game was explicitly designed by the team to be reminiscent of Super Mario Bros.

McMillen worked on level design and artwork, while Refenes coded the game; it was tested primarily by the pair and their families. McMillen and Refenes lived on opposite sides of the United States, and met only a few times in person while working on the game. They developed the control scheme by iterating through several designs, trying to find one that felt fluid and logical. Rather than use a pre-built game engine, Refenes programmed an original one. The game was initially set to include around 100 levels, and to have co-operative and competitive multiplayer modes. During development, however, the multiplayer option was dropped and the number of levels was greatly increased. The pair designed the game to be deliberately "retro", imitating the aesthetics of traditional platform games, but with a modern sensibility regarding difficulty. They wanted the game to be rewarding and challenging, rather than frustrating; to this end they included infinite lives, quick restarts of levels, obvious goals, and short levels. They felt the replay feature transformed death into a form of reward.

Development of Super Meat Boy began in January 2009. Initially announced for WiiWare and PC, the game was set to be released in the first quarter of 2010. The release date was pushed back to the fourth quarter because the developers wanted more time to create extra levels, such as the dark worlds. A picture released on Team Meat's Twitter page on February 22, 2010, revealed that the game would also be released for XBLA. The next day, they announced that, while all versions would be released in the same month, the game would be released for XBLA first due to "contractual obligations". In August 2010, the developers were contacted by Microsoft with the prospect of inclusion in Microsoft's 2010 Fall GameFeast XBLA promotion two months later. As they were almost out of money, they did not believe that they could financially support themselves until the Spring event, but felt they had four months' worth of work left to complete on the game. For the final two months of development they worked daily, slept five hours a night, and frequently forgot to eat—a process that McMillen said he "would never voluntarily go through" again. According to McMillen, due to Microsoft's low expectations for the game, Super Meat Boy was lightly promoted. The level of promotion was not increased during the GameFeast, though the game greatly outsold the rest of the games in the event. The team described the effort required to finish the game for the promotion as "by far the biggest mistake made during SMB's development". The game was released on XBLA in October 2010 and on PCs via Steam and Direct2Drive a month later. McMillen noted that the PC release was more heavily promoted than the XBLA version. A version for Mac OS X was released in November 2011, while another version for Linux operating systems was released in December 2011 as part of the Humble Indie Bundle #4 game pack.

Due to Sony's initial disinterest in the game, Team Meat entered into contractual obligations that prohibited Super Meat Boy from ever being sold on the PlayStation Network. The WiiWare version was canceled because the game's file size had been expanded beyond the limits imposed by Nintendo. Team Meat looked into releasing it as a retail Wii game, but were told by all third-party publishers they approached that a budget title would not be profitable so late into the Wii's lifecycle. A limited edition retail version of the PC game was released in April 2011. It included bonuses such as behind-the-scenes videos, a sample disc of the game's music, and a Super Meat Boy comic. In 2012 Team Meat began prototyping an iOS and Android version of the game. The game is intended to be a different take on the Super Meat Boy concept that is more adapted to touch-screen controls than a direct port would be. Later Team Meat released two images of the new game one with the new graphics and other with the new chapter named The Green Hills.

Team Meat released several pieces of merchandise related to Super Meat Boy. These include Super Meat Boy Handheld, an iOS app released on April 3, 2010 and styled on a Tiger Electronics handheld. It was released as a joke after Refenes' game Zits & Giggles was removed from the iTunes Store following a statement by Refenes that likened the iPhone to a Tiger handheld. McMillen has released a Super Meat Boy microgame for WarioWare D.I.Y. Team Meat sells charms, plush toys, and posters related to the game, as well as t-shirts, stickers, stress balls, and a limited edition Super Meat Boy comic. In 2011, Voxelous released a set of four Super Meat Boy figures of Meat Boy, Bandage Girl, Brownie, and Tofu Boy, later making figures of Commander Video, Jill, Ogmo, and Dr. Fetus.