Apr 15, 2011

Frustration was the biggest part of retro difficulty and something we felt needed to be removed at all costs, in order to give the player a sense of accomplishment without discouraging them to the point of quitting.

At its core, this idea was quite basic: Remove lives, reduce respawn time, keep the levels short and keep the goal always in sight.

Team Meat, Super Meat Boy Postmortem on Gamasutra.
Seems like a Valve quote.
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