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While driving to Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac mastermind Edmund McMillen's home in Santa Cruz, California, I find myself navigating winding highways to the tune of loud, aggressive ska-punk. The music raises a defiant fist against society's ills and screams of fearless rebellion - and while I don't doubt that the inspiration behind those lyrics is sincere, it gets me wondering: how do people who've hit it big going against the grain and making no secret of their disdain for mainstream society actually live? Do they change once the system starts working in their favor? How do they occupy themselves day-to-day? What are their houses like? Do their cats have fur, just like ours? It is, to be honest, a very conveniently timed line of thought, given that it's still stage-diving around in my mind when McMillen - a man who's brazenly taken on topics other developers would never touch with games such as the extremely explicit female-anatomy shooter The C Word - answers the door. After meeting his wife, Danielle, and petting his hairless cats (yes, just like in the movie), we proceed into his room/workspace. There, surrounded by a mixture of traditional game/comic geek paraphernalia and a life-sized organ-baring model of human anatomy, we talk. About poop.
"I tend to like really weird stuff," he says, reclining in an office chair across from me. "I mean, most of my work really does delve into the pee-pee, poo-poo stages of development, the whys of... It sounds retarded, but I'm fascinated with the idea of poop. Because it's considered so gross and weird, yet everybody poops. We all are very familiar with poop. Every day we wipe our asses, and we smear poop on a piece of paper in our hand. And yet it's considered so naughty and so gross and weird. Yet we're all very f***ing familiar with it."
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