Tommy Refenes Speaks on Super Meat Boy Forever and Speedrunning

At PAX East this year, there was one title that we just had to catch up with, Super Meat Boy Forever. What gravitated us towards this game was the wild speedrun scene on the various iterations of Super Meat Boy, a game that almost since inception has drawn in those talented players. We talked to Tommy Refenes, the Team Meat Co-Founder at the event and asked him a few questions.

What has really changed between Super Meat Boy and Super Meat Boy Forever?

The first game was your typical platformer control scheme with the goal of just getting to the end of the level. With Super Meat Boy Forever, I wanted to make a sequel that wasn’t exactly the same as the first one. I didn’t want to just throw a ‘2’ on it, add in 600 more levels, and call it done, even though that would’ve been very profitable for me. It wouldn’t have been fun for me to make from a designer/programmer standpoint.

This game has two buttons. It’s a more approachable Meat Boy game, but it’s not any easier. In fact, it’s actually a little harder than the first game. The reason we can do that is by taking out the crazy dexterity things for control and instead making it so Meat Boy always runs. We can explore a lot mechanically with two button controls.

The levels are actually randomly generated, but not in an endless runner way. Each level is composed of 50-100 smaller levels. We give those a difficulty ranking, a numerical toughness value and we generate a level with a certain difficulty whenever you enter a level. There are checkpoints in those levels. Because they are made up of so many little chunks, if you were die on the next chunk in a sequence, you would respawn at the start of the chunk you died on. Otherwise, it would just be brutal and not fun.

What inspired the change to be more of a runner game?

A long time ago, in 2011, everybody was putting everything they could on iPhones. People really wanted Meat Boy on iPhone; we would get emails and stuff about it all the time. For me, I was like Super Meat Boy is not going to work on iOS. I was thinking of it in its current iteration at that time, a twitch platformer, where full control of the movement of the character in order to beat the levels.

It took me a while to come to the conclusion that people just want a Meat Boy game that is fun and hard on their mobile phone, not necessarily a port. In a hotel room at GDC 2011, I prototyped a one-button Meat Boy game to see if the concept could actually work. I saw a potential in that and thought it was something that could actually work.

Fast forward to 2014, we started working on that idea and did that for about three months. We showed it at PAX West and then we didn’t work on it again until 2017. I played the 2014 build and still thought it had serious potential and deserved to even be a sequel to Super Meat Boy. We scrapped that build and kept the idea of his running constantly and added a punch and dive attack. I put in enemies and kind of went from there.

The main inspiration was to not do the same thing over and over, because if we would’ve done what everyone else was doing when we put out Super Meat Boy, we would’ve made a game with mediocre difficulty that I doubt would have the same impact that it did. People like a challenge, because that’s what hadn’t been given to them in other games at the time.

Super Meat Boy Forever gives you that same kind of challenge, maybe more so, but presented in a different way. It’s fun for me to work on something like that; it’s a design puzzle, a programming challenge with the random generation. I just don’t want to do the same things over and over. I like variation in the work that I do.

What did the speedrunning community of the last game inspire for Super Meat Boy Forever?

I think what we took away from that is that we didn’t intentionally put in anything for speedrunners. They instead found their own way; I love that. There is a skip that they found that lets them beat Super Meat Boy in five minutes by manipulating how you collect bandages and it overwrites part of the save file and unlocks the last stage. I love seeing that stuff.

The development of Super Meat Boy Forever is the exact same as Super Meat Boy. We perfected the controls and then we made levels. That’s the same approach we’re taking with Super Meat Boy Forever.

When it comes to the speedrunners, they will find their own way through, and I’m convinced of this. Actually, I have evidence of this. The time we showed this at PAX West 2017, we had a bunch of AGDQ speedrunners come by and they tore through the game and they were doing stuff that Kyle and I had only just discovered. That’s part of the speedrunning pedigree; they analyze games and break them down. They obsess over it to the point where they find things that weren’t intentionally put into the game.

The best speedrun games are the ones not meant to be speedrun. Ocarina of Time was never meant to be played that fast, but you get a fish and flip backwards a few times, warp through the floor, and then you’re at Ganon’s Castle. You know?

I love that type of play; it’s so insane!

Did you put in any secrets or anything that were designed for the speedrunning community?

Absolutely! As I mentioned before, every level is generated from 50-100 smaller levels. We’re actually going to have a difficulty mode in the game where you play through all of these smaller levels in one sitting and if you die you start over. For me, that is the ultimate speedrun challenge. We’ll give the players some sort of reward for it, but it’s a total bragging rights kind of thing. If you can make it through “Whatever We Call It” Mode, then you’re amazing.

I imagine there would be a speedrunning category of that, because it's like a 100% category where they have to beat every single chunk. The fastest way to do that, rather than the randomization, is to just power all the way through. I think that would be an ultimate test of skill for someone, if they could seriously go through 100 of these little levels without dying.

That would be awesome.

The Super Meat Boy community is pretty large at this point. If a player is coming from that first game into Super Meat Boy Forever, what tips would you give them?

Honestly, the gameplay is similar. The levels are made in a way to complement the two-button controls, so I feel like a lot of the Meat Boy skill transfers over. It’s the exact same physics, with the exception that he just runs constantly. It’s tuned the same, because I don’t want to take away the Meat Boy feel from this game.

I think that the pro Meat Boy players will pick up Forever and run with it. At least, I certainly hope so.

What are some of the most standout stories from Super Meat Boy players?

Mostly recently was when SpikeVegeta and a bunch of players from AGDQ came over and ran the game. I was thrilled to see that, because speedrunners tend to be the biggest fans of games. They say it every time at the Games Done Quick events, if you want to get started running a game, play a game you love.

That’s the most recent thing, but my personal favorite was there was a hidden character in Super Meat Boy called the Meat Ninja and that character could actually warp through obstacles if you timed it correctly. When designing that character, we always thought it would be cool if someone made a video where they just blast through the entire game with the Meat Ninja. Not a month or two after the game came out, somebody did that.

I loved that and sent them T-shirts and stuff and was like this was exactly what I wanted to see. Of course a speedrunner pulled off that fantasy challenge.

Since there were secrets in Super Meat Boy, one would imagine there would be some in Super Meat Boy Forever. Are there any you can share with us?

Not yet, because the way the stuff is in the game is different kind of. I don’t want to spoil anything about it, but I think people that like secrets and little things like that, I know they are going to be very happy with Forever. I wish I could talk about it, because this stuff is nuts, but I can’t reveal anything.

I can promise though, that it’s worth it.

Super Meat Boy Forever is coming to Switch, Xbox, PS4, iOS, Android, and PC. What version do you think players will gravitate towards the most?

I think it will be the Steam version, because that’s just where the bigger market is. If I’m trying to estimate, I’ll think it’ll be, in order: Steam, Switch, and then either Xbox or PlayStation. Those tend to be around the same, but I think we’ll have more players on Steam. If there was a console that would have more, I think it could be Switch. It seems like everyone has a Switch and everyone wants to buy games on it, myself included.

Does the Switch version play differently in portable mode?

Nope, it’s exactly the same on all versions. That’s the goal, I want that pairity all platforms.

When is it coming out?

Well, we’re aiming for Q2 or Q3 of this year. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Will there be any expansion to the game post-launch?

We’re not saying no to the idea, but we don’t have any plans at the moment. If there was any DLC, I think it would just be more levels and more stuff to play with.

Find more information about Super Meat Boy Forever on the official website. For more speedrun action, check out this piece about the Spyro Reignited Trilogy and how runners have reacted to the news.