In 2008, a then-28-year-old Edmund McMillen, was prepping for his high school reunion in his hometown of Santa Cruz, Calif.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t seem “the type” to actually attend a 10-year high school reunion.

What did matter, though, was the enduring memory of a particular classmate who had told McMillen that he’d never amount to anything unless he “learned to be social.”

McMillen and his girlfriend showed up late to that night’s event. A copy of Nintendo Power magazine—the one with the write-up on the video game he was currently working on, Super Meat Boy—sat in his car.

McMillen never got his comeuppance. Not on that night, at least.

“A lot of people were really drunk already,” he describes now. “It became the opposite of anything I ever could have imagined. It was so depressing and everybody was so depressed.”

McMillen, now 35, brings his eyes to the ceiling.

“And being drunk did not help. Within an hour, there were people falling over tables and crying about lost loves and what they’ve done with their lives. And we were only, like, what, 28 at that point? Life is just starting, and they were acting like it was over.

“It was so weird to see these people who were essentially the same people the last time I saw them. And they felt so incredibly trapped—they just accepted their fate. They’d already given up. It really was something that stuck with me for a while, and … put me in a really weird mood for weeks.”

And just like he’d done since he was a child, McMillen turned to his art—or, more specifically, video game design—as an outlet.

A still from the introduction of Time Fcuk (Edmund McMillen)

He began work on a game that’d later be titled Time Fcuk, where the protagonist is forced into a box by a future version of himself.

McMillen at the time was in a self-described “shitty situation” with a business partner. He felt that the IP (intellectual property) they worked on together was his “only option as a future.”

“I knew I was in this dead-end situation where nothing was going to be progressing unless I did something about it. I could just sit here and die with this person or I could find the exit and get out of there,” he explains. “I had to close this door to say it isn’t working.”

Courtesy of Edmund McMillen

Time Fcuk is the last game McMillen worked on before the release of Super Meat Boy.

2010’s Super Meat Boy—which brings us the tale of a boy made of meat (as in a skinless boy rather than a lump of anthropomorphized meat) seeking out his true love, Bandage Girl—turned out to be a hit, of course, both critically and financially. McMillen painstakingly designed the title alongside programmer Tommy Refenes. Their plight would later famously be chronicled in the award-winning documentary Indie Game: The Movie.

The $15 game has sold well over two million copies.

* * * * *

Most of the memories McMillen had from first through fifth grade were of him sitting on the toilet, focusing on the floor of a bathroom stall, downing Tums and Maalox.

“I had ulcers growing up, so I was doubled over in pain throughout my childhood,” McMillen reveals. “I was very nervous—I always thought my mom was going to die. I would either fake sick or be sick and I’d go home a lot.”

It’s the reason why his title character in the biblically influenced game The Binding of Isaac can be often found in the restroom. In the Zelda-inspired game, Isaac shoots teardrops from his round, gleaming eyes at various monsters (like Fistula, Pestilence, and uh, the final boss, Mom) and even swirls of poop.

The successful clearing of each level gives us a further glimpse into McMillen’s childhood psyche: Instead of the typical victory leap and/or peace sign we usually get from video game heroes, we witness Isaac crumpled on the floor with more tears in his eyes. A thought bubble appears and some gruesome memory is displayed: teasing, bullying, visions of Isaac falling to his death. And if you die? Well, you get a copy of Isaac’s last will and testament in which he leaves all his worldly possessions to his cat, Guppy.

In the opening scenes of The Binding of Isaac, God orders Isaac’s mother to murder her son in order to prove her faith. Isaac panics and escapes through a trapdoor into the basement, where he’s forced to confront room after room of blood, villains, and bad memories.

It’s a modern-day echo of the story of Abraham from the Book of Genesis, where God orders Abraham (known as the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) to sacrifice his son Isaac. An angel stops Abraham right on time—just a test of faith, is all.

“I thought it would be interesting to take something from the Bible that was written in a factual way and say, ‘What if this happened now?’ The one thing I learned a lot with Isaac is that I don’t really think people believe in the way that they think they believe,” McMillen says. “I believe that everybody hopes. I believe there’s a lot of people who hope these things are real that they believe in. But I don’t think they believe in it. If they really believed in it, they would think these people ‘hearing the voice of God’ weren’t crazy.”

Oh, as for the mother in the game, McMillen points out that Isaac never once confirms that the character is actually mentally ill.

“I never said the mother’s insane! I said the voice of God was telling her to do this—I never said she was nuts.”

“It was never implied that she’s insane. And if you’re going by the Bible and you believe all the stories, then why wouldn’t you think that it’s possible now for that stuff to happen?”

The aesthetic of the game itself is—discordantly—captivatingly cute. The Binding of Isaac’s disturbing motifs are padded by characters with disproportionately large, round heads and gleaming eyes. It was very much a conscientious decision made by McMillen to soften the game.

“The themes run dark and it’s weird to talk about because when you separate them out and you don’t have the humor, then it seems really terrible and I don’t ever wanna make a game that’s just really terrible and puts you in a horrible mood,” McMillen explains. “That’s why I try to make it as cute as possible when I want to get a really dark message across. The bigger the eyes…”

McMillen’s Binding of Isaac is a genuine success. The summer following its 2011 release, The Binding of Isaac began a steady climb of selling 1,000 copies a day. Then it was 2,000 a day. Then 3,000.

But why? It’s not an unusual question given that Isaac is a game built on the foundations of McMillen’s childhood psychological trauma, something he doubled down on in 2014’s expanded The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, which allowed you to unlock other playable characters such as Mary Magdalene, Cain, Judas, Eve… all pretty spectacular sinners.

Even McMillen can’t quite explain its appeal, although he surmises that the rise of the Let’s Play community (where YouTubers record gameplay usually paired with humorous commentary) might have something to do with it.

“Back in the day, when I released it, everybody was like, ‘Why would I wanna play a video game about a naked abused child who cries on shit?’” McMillen asks. He pauses a beat.

“And that’s what it is! No one sees it anymore! No one sees the naked child with tears streaming down his face crying all alone in a basement of shit. lt’s like Mario, you don’t see the mushroom drug themes, you just see the game.”

As with the rest of his work, the unsettling themes of The Binding of Isaac are the result of something—or someone—from McMillen’s childhood.

* * * * *

Even as a kid, McMillen had a dissenting view of the world. What is it exactly, after all, that makes “bad” things bad?

After a fifth grade teacher brought in a stash of old MAD magazines, McMillen swiped an R. Crumb comic in the mix: “It was very dirty,” he says with a laugh.

McMillen with his grandmother and grandfather. (Courtesy of Edmund McMillen)

His childhood was peppered with the discovery of things he shouldn’t have discovered.

“And then [I’d] study those things. I was always about trying to figure out why I wasn’t allowed to see these things—all the ‘dangerous things’ I shouldn’t do, look at, or say.”

McMillen says he’d even practice articulating curse words by recording himself saying them, then fervently replaying the recording so he could maybe pinpoint why so much power was placed on these words.

“I’d also flip myself off in the mirror,” he adds with a smile.

Unsurprisingly, McMillen’s attraction to forbidden things led him to explore the darker side of art.

“I was really into horror movies mostly because it was that section you’re not supposed to go down,” he admits. “I was kinda obsessed … with looking at the cover boxes and trying to imagine what the movie would be about.”

He recalls staring intently at a poster for Beetlejuice and immediately conjuring up stories from the creatures depicted on it.

“I saw Toxic Avenger, Evil Dead 2, and Nightmare on Elm Street,” he ticks off on his fingers, “between the ages of five and seven. I was definitely interested in stuff I wasn’t supposed to see.”

He shares that horror remains his favorite film genre while gesturing towards some Jason Voorhes figurines (“There’s something simplistic about it. I just like the idea of a retarded killer—an unkillable retarded killer is very appealing to me.”) neatly lined up on his window sill. A wrinkly poster for Evil Dead 2 hangs in the background.

It’s this independent spirit that wedged itself between McMillen and his family when it came to the topic of religion. While he’s quick to discern that he’d prefer not to be labeled as an atheist, McMillen knew from a young age that Christianity just wasn’t for him.

“I can’t say I ever believed in God … My earliest memories of all this stuff … I felt like I always knew it was a story,” he says slowly. “It was stuff you learned lessons from. I didn’t see any difference in the Jesus story and Three Billy Goats Gruff. It was all told in time with each other.”

McMillen’s parents divorced when he was 5. Following their divorce, McMillen’s father shed his drug addiction and became “very, very into Jesus.”

McMillen goes on to describe his dad as a “stereotypical hardcore Christian” with anti-gay and anti-evolution beliefs. “I was a kid and very young, and he’s telling me these things I know aren’t true,” McMillen recalls. “And it’s weird to have your dad, the person you’re supposed to learn from and look up to, be like that.”

He recounts the time his father came to the conclusion that McMillen was gay (“I guess I hung out with a lot of gay people, and I may have defended a gay person or something”) and attempted to “deal with it.”

Despite all that, McMillen says his father’s family was even worse, describing weekends with them as fire and brimstone.

“I was already a really black sheep in the family—I was this weird artistic kid … but there was a lot of pulling me aside and explaining to me that what I was doing [and things that I liked were] evil,” McMillen recalls.

His Dungeons & Dragons manuals were just one of the sources of bizarre confrontation.

But any time tensions at home flared up between McMillen and his stepdad—a stubborn “biker dude” with a penchant for cursing—McMillen says he would head over to his grandmother’s house.

He describes his grandmother as his absolute number one and the sole person in his family who truly understood him.

In Indie Game: The Movie, McMillen goes into detail on how his grandma supported him and his passion for art—as eccentric as it could be—from the beginning.

“My mom feels really horrible when she sees the movie and goes, ‘Well, you know, I raised you, too,’ ” McMillen explains with a laugh. “I guess the better clarification is that my grandmother was like my rock.”

This is where he takes a breath before turning behind him to look at his wife, Danielle.

“I can’t worry about my mom reading this,” he says. “She’s not going to read this.”

He continues: “My grandma was my number one. What are you going to do? She was the one who really believed in what I was doing and was my biggest fan even though I was doing these vulgar, weird things that went against the foundation of what she believed in. The foundation of what she believed was just to be accepting and understanding the intentions of the person.”

He says that although his grandmother was a practicing Catholic, she never once forced her beliefs on him growing up, believing that her faith was very personal for her. Before her death in 2007, McMillen says she left a few things instilled in him, including the importance of mental health. McMillen’s own grandfather suffered from depression.

“Yeah, my grandma’s not around anymore, so it’s not like we have someone to go to and talk about these sorts of things with,” McMillen explains. He and his wife now visit a therapist weekly. “But that was one of the many value systems she put in place: make sure you take care of yourself. Yeah… she was good.”

While McMillen’s relationships with his father, mother, and stepfather have radically improved since becoming an adult, he maintains that tensions got extra strange when a few family members came out of his past to seek financial assistance after learning of his success.

As for those self-imposed boxes of Time Fcuk, that one girl from high school, and his not-so-positive experiences with religion growing up? McMillen finds game-making to be a cathartic experience, asserting that he tries to be as progressive as possible.

“I do feel like, especially with Time Fcuk and Isaac, you go in exploring one aspect and you come out the other side with a better grasp on it. It forces you to question your own ideas.

“With Isaac, it was an angsty, frustrated take on religion. I definitely went in feeling [like], ‘I’ll show them!’ and I came out feeling like, well, I can’t deny that if I didn’t grow up Catholic I wouldn’t have all these pieces. It’s an incredibly creative religion. And rituals are calming and comforting… I don’t know,” he trails off. “You come out different… [and] grow up a bit.”

* * * * *

McMillen’s first date with his wife happened when she was 15 and he was 19—they met each other at the local Blockbuster where McMillen worked.

“She was too cool for school. Literally,” McMillen laughs. “She’s a perfect match. I definitely got lost in that for a long time, and I guess I still am.”

McMillen proposed to Danielle while onstage, accepting the Game of the Year award for Gish at the 2004 Independent Games Festival. They married a month later.

Courtesy of Edmund McMillen

“And we’ve been together 16 yeeeeeeeee-ars!” McMillen shrills.

The couple has operated as a unit for more than half of Danielle’s life now, from McMillen’s comic-making, flash game-designing, mall kiosk-working, animal control officer early days to his prosperity as a highly regarded true independent game developer today. When McMillen needed the support while creating Gish, Danielle would pick up extra shifts as a dog groomer. Later, when she wanted to focus on creating plush featuring McMillen’s game characters, McMillen decided it was “her turn” to do what she wanted to do with her career.

The McMillens and their cats still call Santa Cruz home. From left to right: Guppy (RIP), Moxie, Tammy, Cricket. (Courtesy of Edmund McMillen)

McMillen says he’s currently working on four projects—including a Super Meat Boy project with Refenes, and a promising new game he describes as “by far the darkest thing I’ve ever worked on” that is a parody of internet culture and the potential darkness of its anonymity.

The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth is the upcoming DLC (downloadable content) scheduled for an October 30 release that will be a “shitload more content” that vows to make the world of Isaac even more vast and endless.

And then there’s his and Danielle’s latest venture: The two just welcomed their first child, a daughter named PJ, a few days ago.

“It blows my mind to think that she’s going to have two parents that want her and want to spend time with her. It’s just like, what? That never happens,” Danielle says with bewilderment as McMillen laughs.

“It’s been a long time since me and Danielle have been able to play a cooperative game together,” McMillen adds. “And this is going to be a lifelong game that we get to experience together.”

So what’s baby PJ’s name stand for? Nothing and everything at the same time.

Her parents want to let her decide: As fans of “weird names,” McMillen says he and Danielle wanted to provide the option for open interpretation for PJ when she grows up.

So far, the two have taken a liking to referring to their new daughter as Peach—which is not, McMillen assures, a “dorky video game reference.”

All images and illustrations courtesy of Edmund McMillen