Super Meat Boy, 'Tofu Boy' Square Off In PETA Dust-Up

Animal rights group PETA has countered Team Meat's downloadable platform game Super Meat Boy with its own parody, Super Tofu Boy, a web-based remake that replaces the original bloody, meaty hero with a vegetarian-friendly block of tofu. Edmund McMillen, half of the two-man indie development team behind Super Meat Boy, took the organization to task for Tofu Boy. But he also thanked the organization for the publicity. "First off I want to thank PETA for helping us turn Super Meat Boy into a household name and of course for making themselves look quite foolish in the process," McMillen wrote in an official Team Meat blog post. "See (as mentioned in countless interviews), Meat Boy isn't made of animal meat, he's simply a boy without skin whose name is 'Meat Boy'... but sshh don't tell them that," wrote the typically wisecracking McMillen. The developer claimed that he made various fake user names in PETA's online forums "pushing the game," hoping to cause a stir. In recent years, PETA has become a regular sardonic commentator on the games industry, awarding The Sims 3 with a vegetarian-friendly award, and parodying Majesco's Cooking Mama franchise with Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, for instance. McMillen noted PETA is much more well-known than Super Meat Boy, and expressed that the release of Tofu Boy "is beyond flattering and amazingly helpful." McMillen, a former vegetarian and animal control officer, said he has nothing against vegans or current vegetarians. But he added he doesn't support an organization that is "100 percent against all animal testing," due to diabetic family and friends that benefited from such testing. An extensive back-and-forth occurred on Team Meat's Twitter account between the developer and anti-meat-eating Tweeters. Team Meat is firing back at PETA by adding Tofu Boy to the Steam version of the game. The update arrives today, and is a "parody on [PETA's] parody," according to Team Meat's Twitter. PETA responded to Tofu Boy's addition to Super Meat Boy in a comment to Digital Spy: "We are excited to see how things play out when the two meet in Team Meat’s game; but since vegetarians, on average, live longer and healthier lives than meat-eaters, our money’s on Super Tofu Boy."