Meat Boy

The game looks absolutely nothing like this picture.

Meat Boy is a flash game created by "Team Meat" (which includes Edmund McMillen) and released on Newgrounds on October 10, 2008.

Meat Boy is a game about pain. It is a game about understanding pain in its purest, most unadulterated form, forcing you to go into a fit of madness. It's also an affectionate callback to all of the controller-destroyingly difficult games of the late eighties and early nineties, and all of the clichés that go along with them, but at least here the levels are (usually) short and the lives (usually) infinite.

You play as Meat Boy, a skinless boy, trying to save his girlfriend made of gauze, Bandage Girl, from the clutches of Dr. Fetus, a nefarious prenatal being in a jar that just so happens to have a PhD. It's not exactly the most original plot ever conceived, but the game's still very imaginative. And painful, as Meat Boy must traverse though worlds filled with buzzsaws, syringes, lava, buzzsaws, salt, homing missiles, and buzzsaws. Did we mention buzzsaws? Cause, yeah, there's a lot of them. We mentioned pain too, right?

A map pack was later released on December 8, 2008. A sequel, Super Meat Boy, was released on Xbox Live Arcade and PC in Fall and Winter of 2010.

Meat Boy also appears in the Bit.Trip series as a member of Commander Video's Five-Man Band. In return, Commander Video appears in Super Meat Boy as an unlockable character. Meat Boy is also featured in The Binding of Isaac as an unlockable upgrade power.

Both Meat Boy and Super Meat Boy contain examples of:

• Auto-Scrolling Level: The original has some of them.
• Badass: Meat Boy, and he has to be to get through the stages in this game.
• Big Bad: Dr. Fetus.
• Bottomless Pit: There are several per chapter, but the three other boundaries will also do.
• Brainy Baby: Dr. Fetus.
• Butt Monkey: Both Meat Boy and Bandage Girl get abused quite badly.
  • Doctor Fetus gets this too, especially given the intro. "Nobody likes Doctor Fetus, and that's why Doctor Fetus hates you!"
  • Effectively, every single character that appears in a cutscene is one of these. Especially the tragic squirrel, who is the lone survivor of the forest fire, is attacked by a rogue flying buzzsaw, is vaporized by a nuclear explosion, and STILL manages to come back at the ending cutscene, totally beaten up. Most bosses are also killed off in a rather dark-humored way. They all have a happy ending in the final cutscene though.
• Cast of Snowflakes: All the bonus characters are taken from Indie Games, usually using the original art style, making each one look completely unique and out of place. For example, all versions of Super Meat Boy have a boy in a cape, a girl in gimp gear, a color-changing stick, an 8bit rainbow trailing dude, and a thing that looks suspiciously like Meat Boy, along with many exclusive to different versions of the game.
• Cephalothorax: Meat Boy and Bandage Girl.
• Cerebus Syndrome: As the levels get harder:
  • Chapter 1: The Forest
  • Chapter 2: The Hospital
  • Chapter 3: The Salt Factory (note: salt kills Super Meat Boy)
  • Chapter 4: Hell
  • Chapter 5: The Rapture
  • Chapter 6: The End
  • Chapter 7: The Cotton Alley, which has a pink and white theme
  • And the bonus dark worlds for all of the above.
• Character Select Forcing: Some bandaids can only be obtained with certain characters.
• Collision Damage: Although justified in some of the cases.
• Convection, Schmonvection
• Creator Thumbprint: It's not Edmund's first game which features a character in a developmental stage of a life cycle.
• Death by Irony: Both games end with Bandage Girl, who had been kidnapped and punched repeatedly by Dr. Fetus throughout the game, stomping Dr. Fetus to death.
• Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: Usually. Unless counting some of the Warp Zones in Super Meat Boy.
• Determinator: Meat Boy, who gets abused quite badly but still keeps trying to rescue Bandage Girl.
  • Anyone who manages to unlock The Kid.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Sort of parodied. Doctor Fetus regularly brags with pirating copies of Super Meat Boy in his in-character twitter account.
• Damsel in Distress: Bandage Girl. Meat Boy is a Dude in Distress in the Harder Than Hard Bonus Level where their roles are flipped.
• Eternal Engine: The Factory.
• Everything Trying to Kill You
• Fetus Terrible: Dr. Fetus.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell
• Flipping the Bird: One signature pose of Dr. Fetus.
• Green Hill Zone: The Forest.
• Grotesque Cute: Especially in Super Meat Boy.
• Heart Symbol: Present in a few cutscenes.
• High-Class Glass: Dr. Fetus has a monocle on his jar.
• 100% Completion: Necessary for the Golden God achievement.
• Immortality: According to the Hell, The End, & Cottton Alley chapters, besides Meat Boy, everyone in the MB universe is immortal. An entire universe... Unable to die permanently...
  • Meat Boy is a combination of type IV and V.
• Kryptonite Is Everywhere: The Salt Factory.
• Level Editor: Meat Boy featured one. Super Meat Boy gets one for the PC version. A prototype devmode was accidentally left in the game which resulted the creation of user-generated content much earlier on.
• Malevolent Architecture: Who puts buzzsaws in salt factories and skyscrapers anyway? (At least the forest sort-of made sense as an out-of-control logging operation.)
  • As you play through the Hospital, you'll begin to wonder where all these syringes come from, and why they're stuck to the walls and ceiling, needle-down.
• Marathon Level: Some levels such as Omega, compared to the norm.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover:
  • The first game alone had Gish and a Castle Crashers.
  • The level pack contains N and some characters called "Alien Hominid" and "Pico".
  • Super Meat Boy takes it to extremes with many major indie games having a representative, including Jill, Steve?, Captain Viridian, Tim, Commander Video, Ogmo, Spelunky, Runman, again, N, Alien Hominid and a Castle Crashers, Josef, Flywrench, Naija, and The Kid. To the surprise of everyone, there's also a Headcrab for those who own both the Steam version and Half-Life. Each of those characters has their own special abilities, be it a Double Jump, limited levitation or tunneling.^[1]
• Meaningful Name: All the main characters.
• Megaton Punch:
  • Dr Fetus sometimes likes to do that to Bandage Girl.
  • The boss of Hell, Little Horn, likes to do this.
• Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr. Fetus.
• Nice Hat: Dr. Fetus' top hat.
• Nintendo Hard: And get used to Meat Boy's speed. Although those who think the game isn't hard enough, in Super Meat Boy, there is a more difficult counterpart to each level.
  • Cotton Alley. The Kid's levels. Dark World Rapture. Have fun, kids.
  • The Expert Remix chapter (which contains versions of main game levels that are even harder than the Dark World) means even more controller tossing.
  • The Kid's 2011 Christmas features four difficult levels (though one can be broken easily by turnstile hopping). The fifth however asks you to traverse the original Kid's level backwards.
• Nitro Boost: Conveyor belts in the factory.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder
• Overdrawn At the Blood Bank: Meat Boy leaves blood stains everywhere, and is the only man who can bleed days without dying.
• People Jars: Dr. Fetus is in one.
• Reference Overdosed: Shout-Out count to other works is very high in Meat Boy series.
• Resurrective Immortality: Meat Boy is a One Hit Point Wonder, but reforms within one or two seconds, much to the frustration of Dr. Fetus. And not just during gameplay, during cutscenes too!
• Retraux
• Rustproof Blood
• Sadist Show
• Save the Princess
• Secret Character
• Short Run in Peru: Russia is the first country to get an official retail version of SMB.
• Shout-Out: The game has a large amount of them, which is expected from an indie game.
  • The Flash game opens with Dr. Fetus stealing Bandaid Girl ala Ghosts N Goblins. This is also present in Chapter 7 of Super Meat Boy, except Dr. Fetus captures Meat Boy instead. Super Meat Boy likewise begins each chapter with a re-enactment of the opening to a different game:
    • Chapter 1: The CPS1 editions of Street Fighter II (The World Warrior, Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting)
    • Chapter 2: Castlevania
    • Chapter 3: Adventures of Lolo
    • Chapter 4: Ninja Gaiden
    • Chapter 5: Mega Man 2
    • Chapter 6: Pokémon Red and Blue
    • Chapter 7: Again, Ghosts 'n Goblins
    • Chapter I (Xbox 360 only): Bubble Bobble
  • Also: Hot Coffee.
  • There are shout outs to other indie games too (Canabalt, for example).
  • Chapter 5 of Super Meat Boy is called Rapture, which is the same name of Chapter 5 of Gish (which takes place in church).
  • The message at the end of every Warp Zone level is a nod to different Mario games; NES-style levels are nods to the original Super Mario Bros castle levels ("Thank you Meat Boy, but Bandage Girl is in another Warp Zone"), while Game Boy-style levels are nods to the boss levels of Super Mario Land (wherein "Daisy" would turn into a monster and run away).
    • Furthermore, the characters that say that Bandage Girl is in another Warp Zone are also shout outs; for example, the Ninja from Nikujin or Captain Viridian from VVVVVV.
  • A Donkey Kong-styled level in Chapter 4 is named "Wiebe", and in its Dark World counterpart is called "Billy Boy".
  • When you successfully complete a level with a bandage collected, the message "Bandage get!" appears, referring to the Japanese version of Super Mario Sunshine.
  • One of the glitch worlds resembles an airship from Super Mario Bros 3 -- complete with fixed-speed sawblades simulating auto scrolling.
  • The sound when picking up a key (when not in a Warp Zone) is the same as from Atari's Gauntlet.
• Slapstick Knows No Gender
• Stylistic Suck: Joke Super Meat Boy for iPhone.
• Temporary Platform
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Bandage Girl has a flower.
• This Is Gonna Suck: The player's reaction to many of the levels.
  • Also Meat Boy's reaction to the salt factory, at least in the first game.
• Toothy Issue: Meat Boy has a very distinctive missing tooth.
• Troll: In-series example, as in Dr. Fetus' Twitter account.
• Villain Teleportation: Which is used to snatch Bandage Girl (most of the time).
• Wall Jump: One of your main techniques to victory.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Each time you get to Bandage Girl in the end of the level, she gets re-captured by the Big Bad.

1. ↑ Some of the characters only exist in either the Xbox 360 version or the PC version. Most PC-only characters have an Xbox equivalent, and vice versa.