Team Meat: Kotaku Is 'Smut and Lies,' Multi-Plat Worth the Hassle
by VGChartz Staff, posted on 12 April 2011 / 7,708 Views
Super Meat Boy was one of the most refreshingly difficult games released in recent memory. To understand how one could create such a unique and challenging title, you need look no further than Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, the charismatic and talkative men behind Team Meat.
I recently had the opportunity to interview the men behind Super Meat Boy. When they weren’t talking about the intimate details of African interior decorating they had a lot of interesting things to say about their work on Super Meat Boy and their plans for the future.
Coming off the recent release of the Super Meat World portal, the team is getting ready to release the level editor and let the fans try their hand at being the cause of broken keyboards and controllers.
McMillen (pronounced McMilan exclusively for this interview) said that they plan to let the fans control the content entirely, putting no hand in moderating what maps are made.
“We’re gonna have to not have any moderation,” McMillen said. “We’re going to have to work on other things.”
“Featuring stuff takes like nothing from us, and I don’t know about you, but I’m over it,” added Refenes.
The road to making Super Meat Boy wasn’t always a smooth one, and Team Meat has been vocal with all the problems they had working with Microsoft especially during a feature event for LIVE Arcade games.
But even with all the problems that Team Meat experienced while working with getting their game released and advertised on Xbox LIVE Arcade, they still think all the trouble was worth it in the end. Team Meat also expressed interest in going through all of it again, as long as the platforms suited their future work.
“It would be nice to see what’s up with Sony, with 3DS…” McMillen said. “If we release something that works on three of four systems and it doesn’t kill us to do it, we’d like to release as much as possible.”
“It was worth the hassle, I’m pretty sure.” Refenes said.
“I think if you would have asked us two months ago if it was worth the hassle, we would have said ‘no,’” McMillen added. “The more time that passes, the more we are okay and understand it as a learning experience. We know what not to do to make sure that stuff doesn’t happen to us next time. One of things being not working with Microsoft.”
Refenes did have some choice words for Kotaku, who reported on a lot of the problems between Microsoft and Team Meat. According to Refenes and McMillen, Kotaku did a poor job of reporting the incident, overly focusing on the negative statements made by Team Meat when their aim was really to warn other developers to not make the same mistake. They felt it was unfair Kotaku focused on that sole portion of the story while ignoring news of the continued amounts of free support and sales Team Meat was giving to Super Meat Boy.
“It was just Kotaku,” McMillen said, referring to who distorted the story the most.
“That’s not really press,” Refenes added. “That’s like saying the National Enquirer is a newspaper… Kotaku is all smut and lies. They’re the best reporters you can put finger quotes around.”
When it comes to the future and what Team Meat has planned, they are clear they will not revisit the Super Meat Boy franchise, stating that won’t be like Nintendo and release a Super Meat Kart.
When asked whether Team Meat is intimated at the thought of laying down such a popular game and going off into the night to create an entirely new concept from scratch, they embraced the idea of having a fresh start.
“I think it’s exciting,” McMillen said.
“I don’t feel any pressure for it to do better than Meat Boy,” Refenes said. “I just want to make something new, that’s the whole thing. It’s not about doing better, it’s not even about making money. It’s about making stuff and being happy.”
You can check out the entire 40 minute interview, which goes from their development plans with the next Call of Duty to Dancing with the Stars to weird things your parents collect here. Be warned, some of the language is NSFW and as it was an interview done over Skype, the audio quality is warped in places.
Header credit: Team Meat Blog
