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Interview with Team Meat

July 29th, 2010 - Ryan

In replacement of this weeks normal entry of our weekly podcast we have an interview with Edmund McMullins and Tommy Refenes from Team Meat – the creative minds behind the popular newgrounds game Meat Boy and the soon to be released Wiiware, Xbox Live and Steam game Super Meat Boy.
You can play the original Meat Boy HERE

Here’s a couple clips from the interview:

Jason – “Being that Super Meat Boy and meat boy’s goal was to be a difficult kind of game, I was wondering what your thoughts of the newly added Easy mode to Mega Man were.”

Tommy - “That is fucking retarded…”

Edmund - “Thats is probably why the sales sucked.”

Tommy - “At that point why don’t you just go watch a youtube video of somebody playing through it because theres no point in playing the game anymore. Marketing people are fucking idiots, “oh, Mega Man… that game has been hard forever, but you know what players really want? Is not that.”

James - “So that’s totally making you guys put a super easy mode in Super Meat Boy?”

Tommy - “Yeah, the easy mode is just don’t buy the game.”

Edunmd - “You can still pay us though”

Tommy - “We should just have an easy mode that just goes back to arcade”

Edmund - “We should, I wonder if we could get away with that?”

Later…

Jason - “…so in regards to that, you prefer a close knit team opposed to working with a large group of people?”

Edmund - “The smaller the team the more clear the vision, and that is as basic as you can put it. If me and Tommy had 4 programmers and 5 artists underneath us and we’re telling them what we need, and I’m trying to explain the vision I had for Meat Boy and this is gonna look this way, and this has gotta be expressed this way… yada yada yada… If I say to one person I want Meat Boy to be gentle but also confident, and I want him to get more confident as the game progresses, but i still want him to have an innocence… They are going to take that and apply it to what they learned when they grew up and they are going to apply it to the game in their own filter, and the next guy and the next, and it’s like a game of telephone where whatever message you have just degrades and degrades and degrades until it becomes this very basic flat representation of what you said and what you basically wanted.

It’s really really hard in a company of that many people to have an effective vision that makes sense and is cohesive and I think it’s very apparent in games with small teams that their visions are very tightly knit and they have a lot of heart, and I think that’s what comes through when people say indie games have a lot of heart, that they have a great, tight vision. It’s very understood, it’s very realized, and it’s perfect. A lot of indie movies or directors who are very anal about their editing and do there own editing, that sort of stuff too…”

Listen to the full interview as a direct MP3 download click HERE

Thanks again to Edmund and Tommy for the opportunity, it was a blast talking to you guys!

Visit Team Meat at http://www.supermeatboy.com/