This page is dedicated to cover all Beta and Unused content from the original Super Meat Boy.
Characters[]
Unused Characters[]
Ogmo would be the Teal Ogmo from Jumper 3, however Team Meat was worried about people confuse Ogmo with Retro Meat Boy, so they had gotten rid of Teal Ogmo and put in the original.
The Mondo Priest was a character Team Meat had planned on adding in but lost sight of as development increased. The Priest was originally going to have the ability to float like Commander Video but also have the ability to hang in the air for a long period of time, only falling after moving left or right X tiles. At the end of development Team Meat decided to cut a few characters who were upgraded versions of existing characters as they believed it made early ones useless. The only upgraded character they kept was The Kid (Ogmo's upgrade).
Knytt was another early character Team Meat felt would be great to keep, but then got turned into a slightly modified Gish/Gooball that Team Meat felt were useless in-game, so they had gotten rid of the character.
The Golden Knight was a character that simply couldn't come up with a cool ability for, nothing seems to make sense to the character probably because the game he was from was essentially a brawler and fighting moves weren't that useful in a platformer
The Goo girl was going to be one of a few exclusive characters for the Wii version that never happened. She was basically going to be an upgraded Jill with the ability to slow fall by holding jump when you descend she would also have little goo balls that followed her around
Goo Ball was a exclusive character from the PC version, he probably got unused because he is a copy of Gish, you can play with him if you write in the character selection the code ballgoo. Heres a video of Edmund Mcmillen showcasing a video of the character sketches on TikTok, including many unseen ones.
Dumb Boy was a horribly drawn version of meat boy that Dr.Fetus made to make fun of him. That idea may have been reused on the Super Meat Boy Collector's Edition by Indie Box.
Burnt Boy was one of the many dead meat boys from hell, he leaves a trail of fire behind that disappears like meat effect you see when you run, here's a video of the character.
Edmund had stated that Meat Ninja was originally intended to be a zombie vampire from the future.
20 Bandages[]
Edmund said he was about to add 20 bandages in the game but it was scrapped from the game.
Splosion Man from Splosion Man (XBLA) *about to be 20 bandages in the game*/ A Worm from the team17 game Worms (PC) *about to be 20 bandages in the game also*
Dream Characters[]
Aside from these also had a few dream characters and Wii exclusive characters that couldn't happen or didn't have art made for them they are as follows:
Chapters[]
Levels[]
Levels changed a great deal over development, especially the 1st 20. Edmund had a handful of pics from early dev, he thought that he post most of them are from levels that should be pretty familiar to most players. Most notible is the fact that Meat Boy is being used in CommanderVideos warp zone. This warp zone was the 1st warp we made, a 4bit warp zone you play as 4bit meat boy. When we started out all unlockable characters would be attained through bandage collection and not warp zones, both Edmund and Tommy thought the purple 4bit warp felt like something out of the bit trip series so they decided to play around with some characters having warp zones you have to complete as them to unlock them. This worked out perfectly because it also allowed us to showcase that characters ability and instruct the player on their pros and cons helping to understand how they could be used in later levels of the game.
Not many mechanics or hazards were cut from SMB, but there a few things that never made it into the final game. Mine carts, bear traps and organ/skeletal gibs were some of them. Team Meat never added these because they thought it didn't seem to fit the theme of the game very well.
Anyone who owns the Ultra Edition read about how many revisions Lil' Slugger had. It was originally designed to be more of a walking spider type thing while the image below was a mock up Team Meat threw together for Nintendo Power, and the animated gif under it shows the walk cycle the spider version had. You can also see the original designs for the floating and walking diseases found in ch2, later becoming more sticky and blood based.
Found within the game's "gamedata.dat" are the game's files, and some unused stages made for testing. Here is the list of files that are unused in the game (not counting leftovers from Teh Internets stages on the Xbox 360 version) found in the directory [/gamedata.dat/data/levels/]. Half of these seem to be tests
- 1-62.smbl
- 1-62x.smbl
- 1-82.smbl
- 1-82x.smbl
- 1-112.smbl
- 1-112x.smbl
- 1-122.smbl
- 1-122x.smbl
- 1-132.smbl
- 1-132x.smbl
- 2-7back.smbl
- animaltest.smbl
- assy.smbl
Level consists of a little room with a key floating in the middle. If Meat Boy touches the key, he will be killed immediately. It is possible that "fake keys" which killed the player on contact were planned to be in the game.
- boss6test.smbl
- boss32.smbl
Early design of the Brownie boss level. Salt flows from right to the left instead of a heap of salt slowly rising from the ground. However, the salt wave only goes to the left, once it hits the wall, it will disappear and respawn on the start point again. Interestingly, the boss's intro cutscenes still has the salt flowing the way it does in this early design. The level contains a few graphical errors, and is not completable due to several broken hit boxes
- boss52.smbl
- boss62.smbl
- boss62fix.smbl
- boss62.smbl
- boss62xfix.smbl
- bosstest1.smbl
- bossx.smbl
Early design of Lil' Slugger's boss level. Unlike in the final version, the forest in this level looks like it is actually on fire. Fire was removed from the final version, possibly due to performance issues on older hardware. The layout of this level seems to indicate that it was for the original version of Lil' Slugger, which had spider legs
- demon.smbl
Very early design of Little Horn's boss level. It consists only of a few lines and boss object "8". Curiously, the boss object is rotated by 45 degrees, though the rotation of boss objects doesn't seem to have any effect on bosses
Maps and Menus[]
The over world map went through a few slight revisions over time, originally meat boy would walk off screen to the right when you switched worlds and part of the Hud would come down and smash him into the chapter tile when you entered it (this is why he smashes into the tile now). These things looked cool but simply took up too much time to play out and in the end we decided to go with a faster straight to the action overworld with slightly more info
The level maps themselves went through many many revisions over time, with a lot of notable big changes. The 1st is the fact that there is only 15 levels and no dark world, no warp zones and only 16 bandages per chapter, this was the original plan. As Team Meat developed and saw that the game had a lot more potential then they had expected, they decided to go balls to the wall and tripple the number of levels also adding tons more bonus content
The 2nd most notable change is the locks. When Team Meat started development Edmund thought it would be good to use the unlocking system he used in the flash version of meat boy where you play sets of 3 levels, if you beat 2 of those 3 it would unlock the next set. Edmund started to question this unlocking system once Team Meat started to see how people played. When they would hit the end or a locked level and exit back to the map, it would kill the games pacing also it seemed like no one would ever exit to the map or skip a level.. so they cut out the locks completely and simply made it so if you beat 17 of the 20 main levels you unlock the boss.. and most people don't even notice this is the case
Other minor things changed visually, the levels went from stand up door type tiles to tiles on the ground, the hud and map environments became less busy and they removed info on level difficulty (those X's in the lower right) and Medal info due to the fact that we cut grade B awards, because they were basically pointless
Sounds[]
There are some unused sounds found in the game's gameaudio.dat and Special Edition album:
Music[]
Character Select Theme | |
Character Select Theme 2 | |
Dun Dun Dun? | |
World Map Theme | |
World Map Theme 2 | |
Rapture Theme | |
Intro Theme |
Sound Effects[]
Bandaid Girl Angry Scream | |
Book Page Turn 12 | |
Castle Port Cullis | |
DEATH RATTLE | |
Female scream lower | |
Flywrench Typing No Beep | |
Glass Break 01 | |
Hell Scream | |
Underwater Fart | |
Woooo |
Images[]
Unused Coop Roster[]
Super Meat Boy was going to have a co op mode, edmund and tommy even planned on adding multiplayer for the game. It was removed due to being simply not that fun. Currently, the only way for multiple players to play is in race mode.
Cutscenes[]
All characters would have a proper cutscene, only Tim got a cutscene because Edmund McMillen claimed making cutscenes for each character would be too much work.
Beta Intro[]
Beta Intro (Alt)[]
Textures[]
Various unlockables screens and textures has been unused too, here are some of them
Uncompiled Source Code[]
There are 3 uncompiled flash files in gamedata_files\pc\LevelPalettes:
- gbobjects.tpf
- hellobstacles.tpf
- obstacles.tpf
Developer Mode[]
There are some debug tools left in the game, including an unfinished, buggy version of the level editor. Add -devmode
to the game's command line parameters. Press F1 to enter the editor, and press it again to exit the editor. F3, F4 etc. open some other editors.
Note: don't use new level, the palette thing is bugged. Instead, when starting the game, add the command-line: -palette palettefile.lp
Replace "palettefile.lp" with one of the following:
- 4bit1.lp
- end.lp
- factory.lp
- forest.lp
- gb.lp
- glitch.lp (Broken)
- hell.lp
- hospital.lp
- rapture.lp
- retro1.lp
It'll start you with that palette.
Editor Key Binds[]
- Mouse 1 - Place whatever.
- Mouse 2 - Clear whatever.
- Mouse Wheel - Change whatever.
- WASD - Move view.
- Q + E - Zoom out/in.
- Z - Change to 'set piece mode'.
- X - Change to 'parallax mode'.
- C - Change to 'camera mode'.
- N - Change to 'animal mode'.
- L - Change to 'lighting mode'.
- Y - Change to 'animated piece mode'.
- T - Change to 'tile mode'.
- B - Set player spawn point to where mouse is.
Character Select[]
Add -char #
to your command line (only works in devmode), replacing "#" with one of the following:
- 2 = 8-Bit Meat Boy
- 3 = 4-Color Meat Boy
- 4 = 4-Bit Meat Boy
- 5 = Dr. Fetus
- 6 = Brownie
- 7 = Bandage Girl
- 8 = Meat Ninja
- 11 = Naija
- 12 = Commander Video
- 13 = RunMan
- 14 = Goo Ball
- 15 = Mr. Minecraft (Steve)
- 17 = Flywrench
- 19 = Jill
- 20 = Captain Viridian
- 22 = Josef
- 23 = The Kid
- 24 = Headcrab
- 25 = Ogmo
- 27 = Escape Meat Boy (from Chapter 6's second part of the bossfight, where Bandage Girl is on the back of Meat Boy)
- 28 = Alien Hominid
- 29 = Auto-Running Meat Boy
- 30 = Tim
- Anything else = Default Meat Boy
Note that Dr. Fetus is selectable in this mode, which is normally impossible. Pressing the run button makes him shoot rockets. Also note that Alien Hominid, and Tim are here which normally can't be selected in the editor without this command.
Boss Select[]
Add -boss # to your command line to activate boss in devmode.
- 0 = Lil' Slugger
- 1 = C.H.A.D.
- 2 = Brownie
- 3 = Little Horn
- 4 = Larries Lament
- 5 = Dr. Fetus
Please note that some bosses crash the game if some boss objects (white squares with number) are not already present in the level while loading it. Some bosses also crash the game after finishing them in devmode.
Sources[]