Super Meat Boy Cancelled for WiiWare

In an official tweet by Team Meat, the developers of Super Meat Boy, the duo has officially canceled the game's WiiWare version, citing size restrictions as the main cause.

Clarifying the point, designer Edward McMillen stated that in order to fit within WiiWare's 40MB size cap, the game would not have the game's Dark World, Leaderboards, or downloadable extras. Furthermore, the WiiWare version would not have music for the boss fights or cutscenes, and the music would be regulated to only six tracks and one for the retro warp zones. Seeing all of the content cut, the team could not see past the quality issues and canceled the project.

Super Meat Boy was originally announced for WiiWare back in 2009, but as it progressed through development, Team Meat signed a deal with Microsoft to release the game, with promotion, on XBLA first with exclusive online content. It was finally released this past October as the last game in XBLA's Game Feast promotion. A PC version was released this November with its own exclusive characters and an upcoming level editor to replace Teh Internets, and a Mac version is expected for release early 2011.

Some claification is in order. McMillen was not requested nor funded by Nintendo to make Super Meat Boy, but he was originally approached by Nintendo to port another adventure of his, Aether, to the WiiWare service. While Aether would not be completed, Meat Boy was selected to come to WiiWare instead, the result of which is now Super Meat Boy. Neither member of Team Meat hate Sony, but Microsoft's agreement bars a release on PSN indefinitely. The duo had attempted to get Nintendo to push the WiiWare limit up for the game, but the company would not budge.

"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."

-Edmund McMillen, Team Meat

With WiiWare inaccessible, they are looking for a Wii Retail release, but thus far, three publishers have rejected it on the grounds the Wii Retail games do not sell, apparently. Even so, Team Meat is still striving to get the game on Wii, but there is a rapidly-declining possibility of it making it on the system. 3DS development is not confirmed, though Edmund has shown interest in the platform; whether it will produce SMB or not is still unknown.

Here is hoping a publisher sees something in releasing Meat Boy onto the Wii platform!

SOURCE: Joystiq