Super Meat Boy
Published September 30, 2026
Super Meat Boy is a punishingly hard indie platformer released by Team Meat in October 2010, starring a skinless red cube racing to save his bandaged girlfriend from an evil fetus in a jar. The game's brutal difficulty made it a fixture of rage-quit streams and speedrun culture, and its reputation for driving players into failure loops spawned the widely used gamer shorthand known as the 'Super Meat Boy Effect.'
Overview
The game puts players in control of Meat Boy, a small skinless character, dashing through sawblade, laser, and salt-filled stages to rescue Bandage Girl from Dr. Fetus3. Individual levels last only seconds but demand pixel-perfect timing, and the end-of-level replays that show every failed attempt running at once turned dying into a visual gag that streamers loved to clip4.
Beyond the game itself, the 'Super Meat Boy Effect' entered gamer vocabulary through YouTuber and Twitch streamer Failboat2. It describes the loop where a player dies repeatedly to one hard section, then starts rushing through the easy earlier sections to get back to the hard part faster, which causes them to die on those easy parts instead, restarting the cycle2. Urban Dictionary entries also flag the game as shorthand for 'public torture' in gaming lingo2.