In a sad turn of events for Wii owners, it turns out that Super Meat Boy (SMB) won’t be launching on Nintendo’s WiiWare digital download service. Ironically, Nintendo was the first to court SMB developers Team Meat on the possibility of bringing the title to the Wii console.
With interest in the title booming in the wake of a number of indie gaming awards, Team Meat admittedly got carried away with their commercial variant of the Meat Boy game. Microsoft also expressed interest in the title for Xbox LIVE Arcade and Team Meat subsequently planned a PC and Mac release as well.
As ambitions for the SMB project grew, Team Meat lost sight of the limitations of the WiiWare service – a 40MB download restriction. A test version of the game was created for the Wii, but it wa so stripped down from the other platform versions that Team Meat decided to cancel the project for WiiWare.
“There is no way to avoid the fact that if we released a 40MB version of Super Meat Boy it would be a **** version of the game,” said Edmund McMillen, SMB designer. “It’s a lose-lose situation, but the fact of the matter is if we release a ****** game, we will have to live with that for the rest of our careers and have to cop to the fact that it is a ****** game.”
Explaining further, McMillen said, “We knew of the limits early on but overestimated our ability to get Nintendo to raise the file size. It’s lame that there is a 40MB cap on WiiWare games…but it was our fault for blindly assuming this cap wasn’t set in stone, and we are sorry for that.”
There is a dim ray of hope for Wii owners – Team Meat is seeking a third-party publisher to support a retail version of Super Meat Boy for the Wii. So far they have not met with success, as three publishers have rejected the idea. Team Meat will persist however.
The developers are also keen to point out that they still have much love for Nintendo Wii and the other Meatless platform, Sony’s PS3. “If we had the ability the game would be released on all systems, but it just doesn’t seem like that was in the cards this time,” said McMillen.
Super Meat Boy won’t launch on WiiWare << Comments and views
Source: Joystiq
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