Postmortem: Team Meat's Super Meat Boy | Hacker News Reader

Postmortem: Team Meat's Super Meat Boy

gamasutra.com

49 pointsmcantor14 comments

You can follow their development story in Indie Game: The Movie. Very interesting, especially if you're new to the indie game scene.

Only watch if you can stomach Edmund McMillen coming across as a massive douche

I wouldn't say massive douche but there were a few things that I didn't like about their attitude. But if you go past that the storyline is pretty ok and the movie overall, which features a few other game developers is actually worth watching.

If there were more in-depth documentaries about programmers, you would probably find the same types of personalities reign supreme...emotional, introverted, weird. If you consider yourself "normal" & "emotionally stable", then you probably aren't a very creative programmer.

"A massive douche"? You'll have to explain that one, because I've watched it, and he didn't appear "douchey" to me at all.

Are you sure you're not thinking of Phil Fish? That seems much more likely to me.

"Either way, by far the biggest mistake we made during SMB's development was killing ourselves to get into a promotion we would gain basically nothing from."

After suffering through something similar, I will never work for a marketing deadline again. Deadlines are useful, but I have yet to see a marketing deadline live up to the promise.

I'd be curious to get the opinion of others on whether or not this was a mistake given the information they had at the time.

It's pretty useless to say "our biggest mistake was x because it turned out to be a huge failure". I'm not interested in hearing someone say "my biggest mistake was eating vegetables every day because I ended up choking on a piece of broccoli".

"... Tommy and I went out that day in search of the most ridiculous sweater vests we could find, broke into Sears Photos and used their setup to take what would become our team headshots. I believe we also submitted some totally ridiculous dev bio to Nintendo that was printed in their press release alongside our photo. ..."

Love this.

The Meatboy team even managed to enrage 'Peta' (ultra right wing Vegans) by gaming their message boards (link below). Enraged Peta put out their own version of Meat Boy, "Tofu Boy" ~ http://features.peta.org/super-meat-boy-parody/meet.aspx So meatboy team put out unlockable 'Tofu boy' character ~ http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2010/12/02/super-meat-boy-hon... The playfulness in this game is addictive and you can see this in the creators.

Purely a semantic aside but how do you characterize PETA as "ultra right wing" in any meaningful definition of that political term?

One-page version: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134717/postmortem_team...

Great little game. Excruciatingly difficult but feels like a work of joy.

Interesting. I was just watching a documentary on Netflix about them. It was a bit depressing. I really felt for them :/

Indie Game: The Movie - http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/

It's a great documentary!

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