Edmund McMillen speaks his mind. Whether it be about games, religion or poo, he never holds anything back. The indie superstar responsible for Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac drops his latest bits of wisdom in this fantastic interview by Nathan Grayson over at Eurogamer.
In the interview, Edmund talks at length about his childhood wherein he found the inspiration for Isaac and in doing so manages to make some very interesting comparisons between games and religion:
“People wonder why there’s a lot of violence in my work. I grew up with a picture of a bloody dying man who is suffering for everybody, a martyr, and it’s the whole idea of self-sacrifice. Your exalted God, your God, rips his body to shreds for the good of the world. Violence becomes holy. And in a lot of ways, in the Bible and Catholicism, violence and gore is considered holy.
You drink the blood of Christ, you eat his flesh. How does that not come in to me? “When I’m going through seven years of catechism growing up and they’re teaching me, you know, spells… I’m learning how to cast incantations before I receive the blood and body of Christ, you know? So I can be protected from the devil. It’s total magic, and I totally love it for that, I love it for its mysteriousness, I love it for its ritualisticness. I think Catholicism is quite interesting. It’s very close to D&D. It seems like such a natural progression.”
That is just a tiny part of this fascinating case study of a fascinating indiviudual and you’d be doing yourself a disservice to not read the full interview.
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