Team Meat’s Edward McMullen’s independent game, The Binding of Isaac, is closing in on 450,000 sales. The game was released on the 28th September on Steam, generating sales mostly through word-of-mouth.
According to an interview with Indiegames, McMullen didn’t expect the gruesomely bizarre action-RPG to sell at all.
”I didn’t expect anybody to care. I didn’t expect to do the updates that I have done,” the developer marveled. ”It’s kind of surreal, honestly. When I started development on Isaac I wasn’t even sure if I should charge for it, because I didn’t think people would want it, in all honestly. I had to shop it around to a bunch of different developers, and say like “Do you think I could sell this?”, because I thought it was way too weird, I thought the content was too disturbing and creepy, I thought it would just rub too many people the wrong way, and I thought the design was just too hardcore for any kind of mass amount of people to enjoy.”
The game has been successful enough for it to get a retail release on the 16th March, thank to interest from Merge Games. The publisher is giving it the full Special Edition treatment.
McMullen also revealed some of what to expect in the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lamb, which will cost $3 USD.
“I wasn’t entirely happy with the game until I was able to trick myself with the random elements and happenings, so I wanted to add so much more,” stated McMullen. “There obviously going to be more of the same, I think I added like 50 items, 20 trinkets (which are a whole new set up), and then as much rare and random happenings as possible. There’s basically two paths, there’s an alternate chapter per chapter. What I’ve shown is the cellar, which is an alternate to the basement. So you could start your game, and it might be cellar 1, which has different enemies, different rare rooms, different bosses, different random happenings that are going to be new to the mix. Then the next level you might be in basement 2, or maybe the next level you’ll be in cellar 2. It’ll just choose randomly from those.”
McMullen was previously best known for his work with developer Team Meat on Super Meat Boy.
