Super Meat Boy was voted our collective 2010 game of the year on Episode 16 of our podcast, Flap Jaw Space. One would think beating out Mass Effect 2 and Super Mario Galaxy 2 would merit additional coverage somewhere at Digital Chumps, but, outside of a small feature I wrote and some E3 coverage I can’t find, Super Meat Boy has been absent from the pages of Digital Chumps. After a month of blood, sweat, and tears I finally completed the game and sat down to try and figure out how it wound up our favorite game of 2010.
The first time I saw Super Meat Boy I couldn’t imagine it being fun or interesting, or at least not enough to enjoy beyond a novelty. It looked like an exercise in frustration, something like the platforming equivalent of Demon’s Souls. Occasionally I like to take the time to demonstrate my gaming prowess (completing Mega Man 9 and a run through Uncharted 2 on crushing are some of my more recent accomplishments), but generally I no longer have the time or patience to get the shit kicked out of me for hours without end. Social situations, review games, work, a significant other, and the huge backlog of games still wrapped in plastic are obstacles, distractions, and obligations I didn’t have when I was eight and could hack away at Karnov of Mega Man 4 every day of the week. These days, if a game repeatedly kicks me when I’m down I would much rather get up and go somewhere else than kick it back.
Super Meat Boy, in true gateway drug fashion, didn’t seem so bad at first. It still beat me down like your favorite unpublishable metaphor, but simultaneously offered a latent sense of encouragement. The brevity of the levels helps, most are under fifteen seconds and nothing is over a minute, but the lack of loading and the instant ability to push a button and hop right into the next level excelled at pushing me forward. Most importantly, the restart after a mistake was instantaneous; not even the music skipped a beat before I was back where I started and ready to go. Pacing is a severely underrated aspect of modern game design and, with the exception of warp zones that seemed deliberately stunted, Super Meat Boy never flat lined on providing motivation.
Also paramount to Super Meat Boy’s success was the progression of its challenge. The first few levels served as tutorials for jumping and wall sliding, but it wasn’t long before the game seemed to be bending me over and doing something uncomfortable. I remember 1-14x took me forever to beat, and I was so proud of my accomplishment that I saved the replay. Having now played the game to completion, I look back on that reply and can’t believe I ever considered that level difficult. I mean, I could probably do that shit with my eyes closed at this point. And yet, that’s what makes Super Meat Boy so endearing. Nearly every level makes the player feel as if he or she has just accomplished something previously considered impossible. You’ll take one look at spinning saw blades, giant lasers, or savage monsters and think, “no ****ing way” and with varying degrees of both luck and skill you’ll almost always get the goal.
310 or so levels was a lot, but kudos to Team Meat for going out of their way to somehow endow Super Meat Boy with a perfect progression of challenging levels. It’s a tough line to walk, making every level feel ever so slightly more impossible to complete probably wasn’t easy, but Team Meat did all of that all the while managing a structured set of rules and themes. When razorblades got tired you got lasers, when lasers were exhausted you got gravity toys, and when gravity toys got old you got a few flavors of insane monsters. It came to a close with a two-part face off against Dr. Fetus (a fight in which I was so entrenched I refused to shut the console off when I had to leave), and then, just when you beat the game and seemingly surmount the challenge of challenges, you’re issued another forty levels in the form of Cotton Alley – complete with soft, soothing music to compliment it’s even crazier challenge. I was victorious but defeated, heartbroken but impressed, angry yet appreciative, and, most importantly, astounded that Team Meat had the balls to actually do that to the player. Laughing at the player and tossing out forty more levels could have gone horribly wrong, but, strangely, it ended up being the best part of the game.
The sense of achievement that arrives with finally completing a level could have been the end-game, but the game’s community features quickly take control and repurpose the player’s goals. Suddenly, completion seems overly simple and gives way to efficiency, a transition that’s effectively managed through smart leader boards. I have never (at least that I can remember) cared about global rankings or seeing how I stack up against random strangers, but talking some of my friends into Super Meat Boy was a surprise catalyst for wanting to be the best person on the planet at that particular level. It didn’t hurt that leader boards were a quick, load-free button press away and the filter options were fantastic, and I used those tools to decide whether or not my score was good enough to stand or if I had to replay a level before I could move on. That stuff got even crazier when my friend Spiderman and I went back and forth in real time trying to one-up each other on 3-2. Going back and forth was addicting, and I wish I had enough friends with the time (and talent) to do that on every single level.
After 30 or so hours I noticed I was starting to develop some form of muscle memory in regard to button input. I would play a level so many times that I wouldn’t even have to think about moving my thumbs anymore. With my brain conducting the order of operations independent from conscious thought, input became automatic. This became particularly scary when I’d screw something up and my hands would continue punching in the previously memorized order of operations, as if I was in some terrible horror film where my arm had gone rogue and was actively trying to kill me. It wasn’t actually scary, but was an experience unique to Super Meat Boy; I hadn’t ever played a game, especially such a brief segment of a game, enough to encourage instinctive timing. Worse, I had been gripping the controller so tightly for so long that my filthy hands had left an outline created by sweat. Remember, it’s not disgusting – it’s dedication.
The strength of Super Meat Boy’s gameplay could have excused a phoned-in presentation, but its reasonably insane approach to a theme turned out to be one of its best assets. The game is obviously difficult, but whereas other titles might try to massage the player’s ego or offer some tangible form of encouragement, Super Meat Boy literally gives you the middle finger; quit out of anything and Dr. Fetus is right there to greet the player with a one finger salute. Speaking of which, holy shit at Dr. Fetus. The sheer concept of a fetus stuffed in a jar atop a tuxedo consumed with the constant abduction of Bandage Girl might have seemed too far off the grid for a mainstream audience, but that was part of Super Meat Boy’s appeal. The game felt like it was made for a very specific audience, and while that might have limited its financial potential, it strengthened the resolve of the interested few to play until they couldn’t. Those who pressed on were rewarded with story sequences, level names, and gameplay mechanics that paid homage to countless references going from Mega Man II to Steve Weibe.
Super Meat Boy didn’t need a dozen hidden characters, 300+ carefully constructed levels, countless homages, actual humor, functional leader boards, and perfect control to succeed. Other releases, downloadable or retail, have taught us that fudging a few areas or flat-out not finishing others are acceptable caveats of the development cycle. People are content to pay $15 for map packs or “three hours” of bonus content, or games that are so bad they require a patch six months later that rewires the entire game. Hell, they’re even willing to pay a similar price flawed games with a precious few shining moments (Comic Jumper and Shank come to mind). Super Meat Boy offered the full, nearly flawless package the day it came out. Any future downloadable content would have felt justified, truly a bonus worth paying for, but they’re even giving that away. In addition to the bonus levels stealthily introduced through Teh Internets, forty more just dropped last week. Twenty fan made, and twenty that remixed already impossible levels. Like everything else, Team Meat didn’t have to do that – but they did, and the player wins every time.
P.S. The last level of Cotton Alley is called, “Bragging Rights.” Here are mine:
