Meat Boy

Overview 
The Meat Boy franchise is a franchise of platform games developed by Team Meat. The franchise was born as a flash game where players had to jump their way through increasingly challenging levels. Due to the popularity of the flash game, the game came to XBLA and Steam where it was met with resounding success. 
 
Each game in the Meat Boy franchise has featured Meat Boy, a small cube of meat that must navigate levels to save his girlfriend, Bandage girl, who has been kidnapped by the evil Doctor Fetus. The player must navigate the little piece of meat through dangerous obstacle courses full of buzz saws and spikes. You are timed and graded on your performance as you master Meat Boy's set of skills such as wall jumping and sprinting. 
 
Meat Boy was made by a two man team: Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes. Their original inspiration came from wanting to make a game about an inside out ninja who had no skin and would die whenever he touched something which explains Meat Boy's extreme difficulty. They made their first game, Meat Boy, as a flash game and the game became very popular to the point that Team Meat got in talks with Nintendo to make a WiiWare version of the game. Despite the game being shown on the Wii at press events, the game ended up being cancelled because of the lack of memory space. The game ended up coming to the Xbox 360 as part of the "Block Party" as Super Meat Boy. It also came to Steam (only for the PC). Once again, success was at hand. The game became one of the best reviewed downloadable games on the 360. The game had evolved since its flash days, now including cutscenes, death replays and bandages. The game also had unlockable characters from other indie games such as Braid and Bit.Trip.Runner who all handled differently. A level editor was later added to the PC version. 
 
The franchise has however sparked some controversy. PETA did not take well that a game about a piece of meet gained so much popularity. PETA made "Super Tofu Boy", a meat free version of Super Meat Boy, promoting vegetarianism. However, this stint backfired as it boosted sales of Super Meat Boy. Tofu Boy was later integrated into the PC version of the game. Team Meat has also been pretty clear of what their views on Appstore games are, they think they're like the Tiger Electronics games of the early 90s. To drive this point home, they created an IOS game called Super Meat Boy HANDHELD which is an intentionally bad version of Super Meat Boy.