We’ve all relished in those “I told you so” moments from time to time, but only a handful of humans on the planet can be proven as wrong as whoever suggested to Team Meat that Super Meat Boy would bomb harder than a pinball game.
According to Super Meat Boy designer, Edmund McMillen, during an interview for The Games Business Show set up to discuss the decision to self-publish Mewgenics, one of the best platform games ever made “launched with no promotion at all” due to the last-minute decision of “a bunch of suits.”
While working with Kevin Hathaway, the very well-known producer behind some of the best indie games like Braid and Castle Crashers, McMillen and Team Meat shopped the game to “biz people” who were said to simply “make up numbers” regarding the game’s projected success.
McMillen spoke at length about the process of launching Super Meat Boy when its promised marketing plans were pulled at the last minute. Said suits attempted to market three other titles alongside one of the hardest games ever made, sticking what would become Team Meat’s debut hit at the end of its multi-week Game Feast promotion event. Though McMillen didn’t name the other three games, remnants of the Game Feast promotion certainly do still exist online, revealing them to be Hydrophobia, Splosion Man developer Twisted Pixel’s Comic Jumper, and Pinball FX 2.
As the games released each week to underwhelming sales, the projections for Super Meat Boy would get lower and lower, with Team Meat being told that “2D is out” and “people don’t like difficult games,” according to the marketing guy. Once the third game of the event “failed,” the whole event was shelved, leaving Super Meat Boy high and dry.
McMillen recalled yelling at the “head dude” over the phone in an ultimately futile attempt to keep the campaign going. It didn’t. Ultimately, Super Meat Boy “sold 10 times” what the other games in the Game Feast promotion sold. And despite being responsible for leaving it to rot with the rest of the Game Feast highlights, the unnamed marketer apparently listed the success of Super Meat Boy on their professional portfolio, potentially leveraging its success to land at another studio despite having “never believed in the title.” I wonder what they think about Super Meat Boy 3D? Do we have another pinball game to pit it against?
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