Edmund McMillen Wants You to Ask the Uncomfortable Questions

A frank conversation about Mewgenics, troubled childhoods, and anxious parenthood

Image: Mewgenics

Today’s guest is Edmund McMillen, a veteran indie game designer who broke into mainstream popularity with Super Meat Boy, one of the early indie hits on Xbox Arcade. The making and release of that game was documented in Indie Game: The Movie, perhaps the most recognizable documentary about the making of video games.

Edmund’s career can be divided neatly into the before and after Super Meat Boy eras.

Before Super Meat Boy, Edmund made provocative, grotesque, and, depending on your taste, quite funny video games and interactive experiments for Newgrounds, where games made in Flash and Shockwave could reach a wide audience long before indie games became widely available on modern platforms like Steam and Itch.io

[A small aside: in this interview, you’ll hear Edmund refer to Tom. That’s Tom Fulp, the creator of Newgrounds, the co-founder of Castle Crashers studio The Behemoth, and a mentor to a number of indie game developers. Edmund included.]

After Super Meat Boy, Edmund has worked with a variety of collaborators on games ranging from minor success to mega hits, like The Binding of Isaac.

In the first act, we talk about his long road from teenage comic artist to his latest game, Mewgenics. And in the second act, we dig into what he sees as his magnum opus.

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This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: A Career Built on “A Cry for Help”

• Act 2: “This Is a Fuck You”

• Patreon Bonus: Tidepools, Pinball, and a Musical: The “Sunny Side” of Edmund McMillen

Guests:

• Edmund McMillen: Co-creator of Mewgenics

• Closing Song: “Fleas and Parasites” by Matthias Bossi and John Evans (Mewgenics)

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On the Patreon for $5

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments

  • This week, Edmund joined me for a second interview to talk about the “sunnier side” of his life, from pinball to musicals to long walks on the beach.

• New monthly bonus episode: The History of Animal Crossing

• Extended show notes, including the free game of the week

• An archive of Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes, segments, and posts

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Image: The Legend of Bum-bo, initial design sketch

Act 1: A Career Built on “A Cry for Help”

• Edmund McMillen’s Newgrounds Games (Newgrounds)

• The Undateables (Wiki)

• Pontifex (Chronic Logic)

• Alex Austin (alexraustin.com)

• The Independent Games Festival (IGF.com)

• The award that changes the lives of its winners (Post Games)

• Evil Dead 2 (JustWatch)

• Braindead (A.K.A. Dead Alive) (JustWatch)

• The Toxic Avenger (JustWatch)

• When I asked about Rage 2’s worst character, I got an unexpected response (Polygon)

• Love on the Spectrum (Netflix)

• Jhonen Vasquez (Wiki)

• R. Crumb Looks Back (The New Yorker)

• Gish (Steam)

• Tri-achnid (Newgrounds)

• Time Fcuk (Newgrounds)

• Aether (Newgrounds)

• Coil (Steam)

• Super Meat Boy (Steam)

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Image: Mewgenics

Act 2: “This Is a Fuck You”

• Mewgenics (Steam)

• Mewgenics review - a roguelite where sacrificial arse maggots and frightful defecation are the keys to success (RPS)

• Mewgenics review – infinite ways to skin a cat (The Guardian)

• Mewgenics Review (PC Gamer)

• Jeffrey Epstein Couldn’t Stop Emailing People About Eugenics (Mother Jones)

• From fringe to federal: The rise of eugenicist thinking in US policy (Al Jazeera)

• A slippery slope to eugenics’: advocates reject RFK Jr’s national autism database (The Guardian)

• The Trump administration’s approach to autism is tangled up with ableism, eugenics, and pronatalism (Stat News)

• RFK Jr.’s Eugenics-Coded Crusade (Vanity Fair)

• RFK Jr. Must Go. And He’s Not the Only One. (Science)

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Image: Mewgenics

Patreon Bonus: Tidepools, Pinball, and a Musical: The “Sunny Side” of Edmund McMillen

• Link and segment available at Patreon.com/PostGames