Trivia / Meat Boy

• Cut Song:
  • The Dark World of Chapter 5 has an unused theme in the 2010 soundtrack. Same to second part of the boss level.
  • Ridiculon's album for their side of the 2015 soundtrack features a theme for "End Retro". This implies that the intro cutscene and the glitch level for Chapter 6 would originally have had its own theme in the 2015 soundtrack. In both soundtracks, the Rapture retro theme is used for the intro cutscene and the Hell retro theme is used for the glitch level.
• Defictionalization: Tofu Boy, who started out as a parody by PETA, became a real character in the game in less than 24 hours.
• Dummied Out: In the PC version, there's a primitive level editor, a complete character select, and a playable Dr. Fetus, complete with functioning rocket launcher.
• God Does Not Own This World: Edmund McMillen no longer owns the Meat Boy franchise despite being the original creator, and all the rights now go to Super Meat Boy co-creator Tommy Refenes. Unlike most examples however, this was completely on Edmund's own accord.
• Schedule Slip: Forever was first promised for the end of 2018, then April 2019, then Q3 2019. It finally released late December 2020.
• Screwed by the Network: In a way; when Team Meat was first marketing the game out to publishers, Sony, at the time, decided to pass on the title due to lack of interest. This resulted in Microsoft more or less getting the exclusive rights to the game. Super Meat Boy wouldn't become available on a Playstation console until Fall 2015 on the Playstation 4 and Vita.
  • This still applies to some extent for the PS4/Vita editions. In between the Xbox and PS4 releases, Team Meat was unable to renew the original version's soundtrack, so they had to make an entirely new one from scratch. This did not go down well with a large portion of the community. Although it's unfair to blame Sony for the fallout between the composer and Team Meat, this issue could have been avoided entirely if Sony got the game at the same time as Microsoft.
• Short Run in Peru: Russia was the first country to get an official retail version of SMB.
• Trolling Creator: In regards to Super Meat Boy Forever, Tommy Refenes occasionally gives deliberately absurd answers to annoying questions from the Team Meat Discord. In one case, when asked why Team Meat "recycled Lil' Slugger instead of creating a new boss" (referring to the Big Slugger boss, who in actuality plays much differently than Lil' Slugger), he claimed that it was part of a contract requiring SMBF to reuse at least one boss from Super Meat Boy, that Big Slugger was designed by Valve themselves, and that if Team Meat didn't use it, they would have to return all of the money they were given by Valve in the past 3 years. All because they "signed a bunch of documents [they] didn't read." Nowadays, the community knows when Refenes is making up ridiculous Little Known Facts like this, and they occasionally encourage it with overly pedantic questions.
  Tommunism: Lately, the #ask-teammeat questions have either been things I can't answer, things that If I answer it will spoil the game, or things that don't have an answer[.] So...I'm taking an approach of when it comes to those questions I may or may not make up the most stupid shit I can think of
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game was originally slated to launch on WiiWare, but this release was cancelled after the game exceeded WiiWare's strict size requirements.
  • C.H.A.D. was originally going to have a "fart attack" that spawns Betuses, however this was cut to prevent the boss battle from becoming too difficult.
  • Every boss in Super Meat Boy was supposed to have a Dark World counterpart, but time constraints ensured that only the Final Boss would get one.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Programer Tommy Refenes spent half a year after the game was done making a portal for uploading and downloading fan-made maps. Several fans found an exploit, told Refenes about it (who told them that he couldn't fix it right then because he was on vacation and so was everyone at Valve), spread information about it on the net and hacked the servers. This, combined with the emotional distress from the Troubled Production of the last few months of the game, caused Refenes to not only lock that feature of the game out as soon as he could, but never look at the Super Meat Boy code again.
• Word of Gay: Dr. Fetus. Team Meat confirmed it via Twitter, but he's DEEP in the closet.

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