When I ask Edmund McMillen whose gameography is more influential on modern gaming, his or Grand Theft Auto creator Rockstar’s, he laughs—then asks, with a note of slight alarm in his voice, if it’s a real question. Despite launching the latest version of his magnum opus, The Binding Of Isaac, on the same day as Rockstar’s industry-dominating Grand Theft Auto VI, as a sort of meta-joke about how the entire gaming industry has fled the field of battle to avoid competing with Rockstar’s juggernaut, McMillen seems genuinely perplexed that anyone could view his work as even holding a candle to the GTA studio’s.
“It doesn’t come close to Grand Theft Auto’s influence on everything, on the culture of the world,” he says of Isaac, even as he openly cites Rockstar’s influences—not, maybe, immediately obvious between gaming’s premiere crime fiction creators and a guy whose most famous game is a scatalogical retelling of a Bible story with heavy Zelda overtones—on his own work. “Rockstar is one of the companies that made me feel like I might have a voice in this and that I might have the ability to say whatever I wanted and not compromise, which is what they’re all about,” McMillen notes. “I’m not going up against Grand Theft Auto in any way where I think I’m going to win.”
I don’t push the point—even if I don’t necessarily agree. No, The Binding Of Isaac (originally released in 2011, and releasing on the latest generation of consoles as The Binding Of Isaac: Repentance+ on November 19) doesn’t have the ubiquity of a Grand Theft Auto; the U.S. military isn’t floating the idea of luring its soldiers into re-enlisting by giving them a multi-day Isaac break. But McMillen’s game (which he originally designed with Florian Himsl, but which he’s continued to tinker with, expand upon, and otherwise support for more than 15 years at this point) has left its mark on dozens, if not hundreds of other games; its ideas about how to make a title infinitely replayable have leaked deep into the groundwater of gaming itself, to the point where you can look at something as unlikely as recent Star Wars racing game Galactic Racer and see traces of Isaac’s design in its so-called “roguelike” approach.
McMillen is, again, more conservative than I am on this count; his standard for counting “games influenced by Isaac” seems to be based entirely on fellow developers outright citing his work by name. That being said, he’s clearly delighted to recount conversations with, say, Balatro creator LocalThunk, who has openly cited McMillen’s work as an influence on his massively successful poker riff. “As a developer, I can see it. I can see Isaac in there,” McMillen says, of his initial time playing Balatro. “And then when I talked to him and he confirmed it, I was like, ‘OK, I’m not completely crazy here, because I’m feeling Isaac. I’m feeling Isaac within this game that is nothing like Isaac.” When I push back on that dissimilarity a bit—noting that Balatro’s genius, like Isaac’s, is rooted in its use of some very simple rules to create enormous, decade-devouring amounts of complexity—McMillen once again reaches for his own influences, noting that those principles are ones he lifted liberally from Richard Garfield’s Magic: The Gathering and Derek Yu’s Spelunky.
“Richard Garfield came up with a really amazing system, core system,” McMillen notes of the Magic designer. “And he made little systems off those systems. And he utilized every mechanical element of every card in some way, shape, or form. And that was always really inspiring to me.” It is, indeed, easy to see this influence in Isaac, which is, at its core, a very simple “shooter” game, one where players move through a labyrinth with one set of controls while firing bullets (or, more accurately, a sad little baby’s tears) with another. Much like Garfield’s ability to harvest every aspect of a card to create play, McMillen and his various collaborators have taken that incredibly simple move-and-shoot template and created something of near infinite complexity; no run in Isaac is the same, because the sheer number of modifiers, deformities, and deliberate rulebreaks that can be stacked onto its basic twin-stick template is nearly impossible to calculate.
McMillen—whose most recent game, this year’s strategy-and-cat-breeding game Mewgenics, has been his most successful Isaac follow-up to date—notes that fans are sometimes surprised when even he doesn’t know what kind of effects his games can produce. He says he sometimes reposts videos of people discovering unlikely rule interactions in his games, like a Mewgenics enemy that can be induced to stack itself into massive, boundary-breaking towers, only to have fans be nearly indignant at his own surprise. “I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ And I retweeted. And they’re like, how do you not know? How do you not know that? It’s like, ‘I don’t know anything. I’m just putting this stuff here and being like, this is going to work. I don’t know all the ways it’s going to work.’”
Over its 15 years of existence, Isaac has moved between waves of revolution and refinement. Its current Repentance+ incarnation—which includes more detailed descriptions for its massive trove of items, and a robust online co-op mode—falls pretty firmly into the latter. (As opposed to, say, 2021’s original Repentance, a collaboration between McMillen and a team of dedicated fan creators that wound up more than doubling the game’s number of playable characters, while putting a definitive final stamp on its narrative of religious misery and redemption.) “It is a beefy, ultimate, best version of Isaac,” McMillen notes of Repentance+, stating his own surprise at how much the addition of full co-op has changed and enhanced the game. (An occasional stickler on points of theme, McMillen says he spent years resisting the idea of full co-op in part because it worked against the game’s exploration of an isolated little kid’s miserabilist fantasies.)
After a decade-and-a-half of feeling moved to give an ever-present fanbase ever more toys to play with, McMillen sounds like he’s finally reached a level of acceptance with the game. “I don’t foresee another Isaac DLC. I foresee maybe little updates here and there. Everything I’ve wanted to do with the story and all that stuff is done.” He notes, unsurprisingly, that he dislikes the very idea of sequels; “I feel like it kind of does the original disservice. I’d rather update the game, which is what I did.”
As to the future, McMillen is mostly focused on Mewgenics, which has at least two DLCs in the works, with a “smaller one” (“which at this point is not small”) coming in “a year” or so, and a larger, “almost sequel-ish expansion” coming at some further future point. That’s in addition to an update that’s coming even sooner, which will give players who want to focus solely on the game’s combat—ignoring some of its more cumbersome management layers—”150 hours” or so of more gameplay to dig into, via a mode that allows them to skip house management and cat breeding and just focus in on the game’s incredibly addictive cat-on-vermin fighting.
All that and he’s fallen into the trap set by recent release Queen’s Domain; even as he jokes about Freshly Baked Games’ new first-person RPG being “Temu Elden Ring,” McMillen is effusive in his praise for its tiny team’s approach to exploration and design. “Even if the game is not super smooth and perfect,” McMillen notes—not purposefully bringing our conversation back to the contrast between his own oeuvre, and that of a perfectly polished machine like Rockstar, despite how it registers in my head—“I sometimes enjoy the flaws more because it feels like at least I’m experiencing something unique. As opposed to the usual formula that you get from every game that’s like this.”
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