Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is a platform game in which players control a small, dark red, cube-shaped character named Meat Boy, who must save his cube-shaped, heavily bandaged girlfriend Bandage Girl from the evil scientist Dr. Fetus. The game is divided into chapters, which together contain over 300 levels. Players attempt to reach the end of each level, represented by Bandage Girl, while avoiding crumbling blocks, saw blades, and various other fatal obstacles.

The player can jump and run on platforms, and can jump off or slide down walls. The core gameplay requires fine control and split-second timing, and was compared to, regarding both gameplay and level of difficulty, traditional platform games such as Super Mario Bros. and Ghosts 'n Goblins.

The game's opening describes that Meat Boy (a boy born without skin) and his girlfriend Bandage Girl (a girl whose body is covered in bandages) love one another, though the antagonist Dr. Fetus (an intelligent fetus in a jar piloting a mechanical body) is unloved: thus, he hates everybody.

One day, Bandage Girl is kidnapped by Dr. Fetus in a fit of jealousy. Meat Boy proceeds to chase Dr. Fetus to rescue her, though the latter causes a forest fire and pursues Meat Boy in a large mech "Lil' Slugger".

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.

Super Meat Boy received critical acclaim. com. The game received nominations for the Grand Prize and Excellence in Audio awards at the 2010 Independent Games Festival. It won the award for Most Challenging Game in IGN's Best of 2010 awards, and received nominations for Best Soundtrack and Best Retro Design.

It was voted GameSpot's Best Downloadable Console Game of 2010, and won the Best Downloadable Game award from GameTrailers. Sales were strong, with nearly 140,000 units of the Xbox 360 version sold by the end of 2010. The Steam and Xbox 360 versions had sold over 600,000 copies combined by April 2011; 400,000 of these sales were through Steam. On January 3, 2012, Team Meat announced on Twitter that the game had surpassed 1,000,000 sales.

Meat Boy has made cameo appearances in video games such as Bit.Trip Runner, Spelunky, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Ori and the Blind Forest, Retro City Rampage, ilomilo, and Indie Pogo. A parody Flash game, Super Tofu Boy, was released by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on December 1, 2010, to protest the game and promote veganism. In response, Team Meat added its own interpretation of Tofu Boy to the PC version of the actual Super Meat Boy on December 2, 2010. The game's success spurred the development of the 1930s-style animated indie video game Cuphead, which is also noted for its difficulty.

On August 29, 2014, Team Meat announced that a sequel, Super Meat Boy Forever, was in development for smartphones, tablets, and Steam. The game would remain in development limbo until the project was restarted in 2017, without the assistance of McMillen. In August 2017, the game was confirmed for release for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS and Android systems. The Nintendo Switch and Windows versions were released in December 2020, with PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS and Android versions following in 2021.