Inside his life's work in pixels
“You don’t have to write that down. I realize I’m a geek, but I don’t want to come off as this huge video game nerd.” This might seem like an odd request coming from Edmund McMillen. He is, after all, a video game designer. In 2005, he and the team he was working with at the time, Chronic Logic , won the $15,000 grand prize at the Independent Games Festival for their wildly popular title Gish . There, he proposed to his now-wife, Danielle, onstage. It might be a little bit difficult to write about him without suggesting that he, you know, likes video games. Yet here he is, smiling and laughing as he says it, but still politely asking that I stop noting the games that he and his business partner, Alex Austin, play at their Lincoln Street office, where they collectively make up the game-design team Cryptic Sea .
But he has a good point. McMillen is trying to stretch the boundaries of what video games can do, what they can be, and what they can mean to the people who play them. He’s not interested in business as usual, whether that means making games that look just like everyone else’s, or conforming to the stereotype of gamers as awkward, pasty, indoor kids who spend 20 hours a day in front of a computer and have no social skills or other interests. To imply that he and Austin spend all their time playing Rock Band (oops) would be unfair; mostly, they work their butts off, designing new and innovative titles that question the conventional wisdom that video games are unintelligent dreck. As McMillen himself puts it: “I want to make art. And I believe that games are a really fresh art medium that can be used in many different ways. I believe you can express yourself through them. I believe they can be personal. And I believe they can move people.”
 Art from Aether
So how does it feel to see all of his art together in one place for the first time? “Honestly,” he says, “a lot of it’s shocking.” He’s talking especially about his first comics, where his career-long fascination with the twin themes of conception and death appear in their rawest forms. “A lot of it’s offensive. It was hard for me to put certain things in, because my views have changed a lot over the years. I don’t feel the same way I did when I was an angst-filled 17-year-old … but I think that it would be best for everybody to see an honest progression. I’m not going to hold back because I feel like I’m going to offend somebody.”
McMillen doesn’t set out to shock. But, as he puts it, “I do alienate my audience a lot. I’ll make something that’s happy and fun, and then suddenly throw a really dark wrench into the gears. It throws people and they don’t know what to expect.” Two of his games, both included on the CD, go a long way to illustrate this point. One is Aether , in which a little boy floats away from Earth on the back of a monster. They visit a series of planets, each of which represent a different aspect of the boy’s inner life and emotional state. Much of the game is inspired by McMillen’s own childhood anxieties and fears. He also drew inspiration from the way his beloved 2-year-old niece seems to experience the world. Players were bewitched by the beauty of the game and its gentle, storybook ethos. It garnered an immense amount of praise, and McMillen himself considers it his best work so far.
Then he made another game. Its name is unprintable, as is any detailed plot description. Suffice to say it involves parts of the human anatomy shooting at each other. He tells me all about it during our interview at a downtown coffee-shop; about halfway through his vivid explanation, the woman at the neighboring table gets up and hastily vacates the room. And that’s the effect it had on a lot of people. The outcry against the game in feminist gamer circles was intense. McMillen himself was bemused by the controversy, saying he made the game largely to assert his artistic independence, his ability to make whatever he wanted regardless of its commercial viability. But he acknowledges that that the issue is complicated: “It’s good to be angry about misogynist games. So if you view the game as misogynistic, then it’s fine that you were upset about it and it’s great to want to stop it. I’m a big fan of the grey area. I don’t believe things are black and white in any sense.”
The criticism he’s gotten isn’t always easy to take. “There’s almost a postpartum depression after you make a game. And the more personal it is, and the more work you put into it, the harder it is to let it go and give it to the world,” he explains. But McMillen wants to keep making innovative games, to continue the conversation with his audience he began 10 years ago, and to do it with as much cathartic honesty, integrity, and humor as he can.
To learn more about Edmund McMillen, visit edmundm.com . CDs of his work are for sale at Cardboard Spaceship , Comicopolis , Streetlight Records and Atlantis Fantasy World .
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