Released in 2010, Super Meat Boy is a brutal platformer revered by critics and gamers alike, and for a long time, developer Team Meat — aka. Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes — wanted to do anything but make a sequel to the game. Instead the team’s next release was another critically acclaimed game, The Binding of Isaac.
McMillens and Refenes recently sat down for an interview with GameInformer about the upcoming spin-off for touch-based devices Super Meat Boy: Forever and revealed that their attitudes regarding a sequel have changed. The development process for Super Meat Boy took a toll on the two, chronicled in Indie Game: The Movie, but in the years since they’ve had time to recover.
“We purposefully avoided working on another Meat Boy because we didn’t want to jump back into it,” McMillen told GameInformer. “Yeah, because it’s hard,” Refenes added. “You want some ginger in between your sushis.” It was actually working on Super Meat Boy: Forever that led the two to consider possibly pursuing a proper sequel.
“There were aspects of Forever that were moves that Meat Boy did … that we were prototyping that felt like they could be better used in a sequel,” McMillen said. “The future of Meat Boy is definitely up in the air, but a sequel is something that I wouldn’t be opposed to doing even though we both said that we wouldn’t do it.”
To actually develop a sequel, first Team Meat will need to clear its schedule. Super Meat Boy: Forever is still in development, and while it was put on hold for a while, cat-breeding game Mewgenics is still in the works as well.
Still, the team is serious. “We wouldn’t even be mentioning anything about a sequel if we didn’t feel like it was realistic enough,” McMillen said. “But with Meat Boy, it’s not the same. With Mewgenics, it’s a genre that doesn’t really exist. We’re inventing as we go. With Meat Boy … we know what Meat Boy is. You run and you jump, right?”
No release date has been announced for Super Meat Boy: Forever, but if you can’t wait for your Meat Boy fix, the original Super Meat Boy is coming to the PlayStation 4 and Vita this fall.
