Released on Newgrounds on October 5, 2008, Meat Boy paired designer Edmund McMillen with programmer Jonathan McEntee for a punishing precision platformer starring a skinless, cube-shaped hero racing to rescue his girlfriend from a villain literally named Dr. Fetus. Newgrounds' comment section immediately fixated on two things: how good the controls felt, and how unforgivingly hard the levels were.

Meat Ninja Becomes Meat Boy

The hero wasn't always Meat Boy — McMillen and McEntee originally built the game around a character called Meat Ninja, renaming him during development specifically to avoid confusion with the player character from N, another Flash precision platformer already popular on the same portals. The rename stuck, and so did the tightly tuned wall-jump-and-dash movement that made the renamed game stand out.

A Prototype That Outgrew the Browser

A free Map Pack expansion followed in December 2008, built around a level creator that let players design and share their own stages — extending the game's life well past its initial release. More consequentially, Meat Boy's reception led both Nintendo and Microsoft to contact McMillen directly about bringing the concept to their downloadable platforms, a conversation that led straight to Super Meat Boy in 2010.

Officially labeled a "prototype" by its own creators, Meat Boy is barely a footnote in most retrospectives of Super Meat Boy — even though it's the reason Nintendo and Microsoft came calling in the first place.

Super Meat Boy is remembered as the console debut that marked indie gaming's arrival, but its origin sits squarely in a browser plugin — a difficult little Flash prototype that convinced two console makers to take a chance on it.