Meat Boy

Meat Boy was created in 2008 as a Flash game by Team Meat and became the prototype from which the much more famous console and PC version, Super Meat Boy, emerged two years later. The player controlled a piece of raw meat with two windows in place of eyes and had to guide it through a series of increasingly difficult platforming levels full of saws, nails, and pits to rescue his bandage-wrapped girlfriend. Controls were reduced to jumping and side-to-side movement, but the precision the game demanded turned every jump into a matter of millimeters and fractions of a second.

The game was built on the principle of quick death and instant restart - the player died again and again, but a new level began practically without delay, so frustration quickly turned into determination to try once more. This exact rhythm of repetition without punishment for failure defined the style that later made famous the whole genre of merciless platformers built on precise controls rather than a complex story or world exploration.

The success of the Flash version convinced Team Meat that it was worth developing the idea into a full-fledged game with its own graphics, music, and more extensive content, and Super Meat Boy subsequently became one of the most successful and influential indie titles of its generation. The original web version thus remains mainly a historical record of where it all began, today available more through archives than in a regular browser since the departure from Flash.

Why play it: Interesting mainly for fans of Super Meat Boy and collectors of gaming history who want to see the raw, unpolished foundation of one of the key indie hits of recent decades.