Hi, I’m Tommy Refenes. You may remember me from games like Super Meat Boy and Super Meat Boy Forever. I’m excited to announce that the Meat Boy universe is coming back to PlayStation later this year in the form of a brand new game called Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine!
Meat Boy has enough games (for now). Now it’s time for Dr. Fetus to become a star. Dor Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine takes place right after the events of Super Meat Boy Forever (more precisely, right after the end, before the credits). Dr. Fetus wants to create Meat Boy clones, and he needs to weed out all the bad clones from the gene pool to get pure, perfect Meat Boys to kill. I wonder what Dr. Fetus would do with an endless supply of Meat Boys…hmm…probably a question for another time.
Children’s saws, lasers, rockets and other hazards
In practice, this means a Puyo Puyo-style match-four puzzle game with a unique hardcore twist, courtesy of Dr. Fetus’ devious tricks. As you try to position your colored clones at the bottom of the screen and create combos, you’ll have to deal with buzzsaws, rockets, and a host of other hazards ready to destroy your clones if you don’t play with the precision that the Super Meat Boy series has always demanded. In other words, what we’re doing with Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine Machine is a hardcore challenge that Meat Boy is known for to create a unique blend of puzzle and action.
The genesis of this game lies in the long relationship between Team Meat and our friends at Headup. We have worked together for almost 12 years in various capacities and we love them. So when they approached us with this idea for a 4-in-a-row puzzle game, we were pretty busy launching Super Meat Boy Forever, but after it was released, we took a look at their pitch and prototype and fell in love all over again. We combined their design and programming skills – mainly Nico Panaiotopoulos and Mark Aldrup – with our art and design skills, and now we have this insanely fun and beautiful puzzle game that we wouldn’t have even thought of making if it weren’t for their an amazing prototype and a desire to create something new and wonderful.
It’s time to enjoy death again
The game features over 100 hand-crafted levels filled with hazards and traps that will test your wits and finger reflexes. This is a game set in the Meat Boy universe, so expect to die over and over again. When you finally die enough, your skills will become second nature, and you’ll begin to beat levels with no more effort than taking a single breath. You will feel accomplished. You will feel… whole. At this point you will have to fight a boss who will kill you over and over again. You will know death. It is very fun and very cute!
If you’re already a fan of Meat Boy, firstly, thank you, and secondly, Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine will have a lot to like. We have a whole bunch of familiar Super Meat Boy and Super Meat Boy Forever locations like the scenic forest, the hospital and the salt factory, all with stunning backgrounds, animations and cutscenes created by the original Super Meat Boy Forever artists. We also have an incredible soundtrack composed by the talented Ridiculon.
It was exciting to see Meat Boy go in a new direction with a team that showed us the possibility for a series we never thought possible. The result is a game that exists in a familiar genre, but at the same time is unlike any other game in the genre. I’m guessing few of you expected the attempt to inject Super Meat Boy’s hardcore meat DNA into a match-4 puzzle (hell, we didn’t expect that when Headup first bought us the idea!). But trust me, it was a crazy enough idea to make it work, and I can’t wait for you all to try to survive Dr. Fetus’s twisted test chambers yourself when the game hits PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 later this year.