Super Meat Boy: A Love Letter Matthew Thomas Payne, University of Alabama,
[email protected] Stephen Campbell, University of Alabama,
[email protected] Super Meat Boy Meat Boy is a sprinting, leaping, sliding cube of bloody red meat. Meat Boy is also a love letter, albeit an unconventional one. The inde- pendently produced multiplatform game that bears his name, Super Meat Boy (2010) – sequel to the 2008 online and free-to-play Meat Boy – is a love letter to the 8-bit platformers of the 1980s and 1990s. Super Meat Boy is also a love letter to players who poured countless hours into those often grueling and unforgiving side-scrolling adven- tures. The game was a breakout hit for its creators Edmund McMil- len and Tommy Refenes (Team Meat), with Super Meat Boy (SMB) earning a number of “Game of the Year” awards and going “platinum” (selling over a million copies) in only a few short months (Yin-Poole, 2012, n.p.). SMB’s success is no accident; indeed, the reason for the game’s critical and popular reception is (at least) two-fold. First, it lures gamers to it with its incisive, self-conscious aesthetic and intertextual references. SMB’s tongue-in-cheek characters and its thoroughgoing black humor satirize the common platforming mechanics and narrative conventions from yesteryear. The game clearly knows and appreciates where it came from. But this by itself would amount to little more than win- dow-dressing were there nothing more to hang these cosmetic design choices on. After all, video gamers are not for want of retro-chic titles that openly trade in gaming nostalgia.