The resilient Meat Boy isn't the type to back down, whether it's from spinning saw blades or his own creators saying an official sequel would never happen. During a recent interview with Team Meat, the duo revealed to us they've been experimenting on a sequel to the punishing side-scrolling platformer.

We spoke with Team Meat's Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes on the most recent episode of The Game Informer Show podcast. When asked about the status of Super Meat Boy Forever's art (an upcoming mobile spin-off game), artist/designer McMillen says he and programmer/designer Refenes were inspired to work on a proper sequel after coming up with exciting new concepts in Forever and the realization that Super Meat Boy could appear on additional consoles.

"An interesting thing happened in the midst of chaos," McMillen says. "We were like 'How can we finish [Super Meat Boy Forever]? We have to finish this, and I don't know what I'm doing.' That was around the time we realized we could release Meat Boy on other platforms, too. So it was kind of like this change of perspective in a way. What we talked about was possibly working on a sequel, and it's something that I like a lot. There were aspects of Forever that were moves that Meat Boy did...that we were prototyping that felt like they could be better used in a sequel. The future of Meat Boy is definitely up in the air, but a sequel is something that I wouldn't be opposed to doing even though we both said that we wouldn't do it."

News of Team Meat working on a sequel to Super Meat Boy comes roughly five years after the duo explained why they weren't interested in doing one. They cited reasons like feeling they got the game right the first time, and that over-explaining characters like Meat Boy and Bandage Girl would do more harm than good.

"We wouldn't even be mentioning anything about a sequel if we didn't feel like it was realistic enough," says McMillen, while reconfirming that work on the previously announced cat-breeding game Mewgenics is ongoing. "But with Meat Boy, it's not the same. With Mewgenics, it's a genre that doesn't really exist. We're inventing as we go. With Meat Boy...we know what Meat Boy is. You run and you jump, right?"

McMillen and Refenes go on to elaborate why they weren't interested in Super Meat Boy back in 2010, specifically noting the toll all their hard work developing the first game took on them.

"We purposefully avoided working on another Meat Boy because we didn't want to jump back into it," says McMillen.

"Yeah, because it's hard," Refenes adds. "You want some ginger in between your sushis."

While Team Meat isn't officially confirming Super Meat Boy 2 at this time, the team did reassure us that Super Meat Boy Forever and Mewgenics are on the way after the original Super Meat Boy hits PS4 and Vita this fall. For the full interview, be sure to watch episode 259 of the Game Informer Show podcast.



Our Take

As a tremendous fan of the original Super Meat Boy and the duo's work in general, I'm personally very excited that a sequel to one of last generation's greatest games is back on the table. Now I've just got to get around to finally A+'ing the final few Dark World levels of the first Super Meat Boy.