Team Meat would work with Nintendo if Meat Boy was added to Smash Bros. roster
Team Meat could support Nintendo platforms in the future… under one condition. Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, the studio’s primary staffers, want to see Meat Boy in a Smash Bros. game. If the character made it into the upcoming Wii U/3DS releases, Team Meat would be more than happy to make Mew-Genics – the company’s next game – for Nintendo.
McMillen: “I want Meat Boy to be in Smash Bros. That would be the one reason I’d really want to develop for a Nintendo console.”
Refenes: “That would be amazing! If they could guarantee us Meat Boy would be in Smash Bros., we would do something.”
McMillen: “Nintendo are you listening? Smash Bros! We would ask for nothing in return. Just f***ing use the character. Put him in the game. It’s free!”
Refenes: “If they wanted Mew-Genics or something and they could promise us Meat Boy would be in the game we’d develop Mew-Genics for them. Not exclusively, of course. This is how they would buy it from us. And that’s a very cheap price.”
Team Meat did come close to bringing Super Meat Boy to WiiWare back in the day. But in the end, it was cancelled as a result of technical limitations and compromises that would have been required.
Super Meat Boy eventually landed on just one console – the Xbox 360, through Xbox Live Arcade. The experience in bringing the game to Microsoft’s system was far from pleasant, so McMillen is hesitant about stepping back into the console space.
You have to take into consideration that when you’re independent, you don’t want to take the risk of jumping on a platform that you have no idea how it’s going to do until it’s already established. When you look at WiiWare, when it bloomed when World of Goo came out it was like, ‘Holy s***! This is a great platform to develop for,’ and then it was like a gold rush and everybody was jumping on WiiWare.
What they should have done was wait a little longer to see if it would continue. Because then it just dropped and nobody cared.
Imagine if we got put in another situation like with Xbox where we were nailed down to this contract of semi-exclusivity and we had to jump through all these hoops and kill ourselves and then pay s***loads of money to get on a platform that’s not established yet and then it comes out and doesn’t do well – imagine that. That’s f***ing horrible.
While Team Meat isn’t jumping the gun to make games for consoles again, McMillen would be open to the possibility under the right circumstances.
If Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft – well, we’ll cut off Microsoft at this point – but if Nintendo or Sony came to us and said, ‘we have a minimum guarantee of X, Y, Z, we really want you to develop a game for our next system that’s coming out in year whatever, if you have something to work on we want to work with you, here’s a free kit to develop for us and here’s a minimum guarantee or advance,’ then we’d be way more inclined to develop for them, but it wouldn’t be an exclusive deal. That’s an important thing for us.
