The Binding of Isaac

Edmund McMillen is an artist and game designer who is mostly known for the creation of Super Meat Boy, a fast 2D platformer game that was released for Xbox 360 on October 20th, 2010. Long before production for Super Meat Boy had even started, Edmund McMillen had made multiple games with various small time game developers that were all released on Newgrounds.com for free.

While Super Meat Boy wasn't made in Flash, all of Edmund's older projects were, and put on Newgrounds. Newgrounds is a very popular website that is based entirely around projects made in Flash. They range from animations to games, and before Youtube, was one of the few outlets creators had to showcase their work.

Edmund loved his games and creations, and even started a small side project that was originally all just for fun, The Binding of Isaac. Isaac was made entirely in Flash. Every enemy, character, item, and piece of code was made in Flash, and animated by hand. It all started a small project that eventually found it's way onto Steam, an online-only PC game store. From there, it grew in popularity rapidly, which was a huge surprise to Edmund.




The Binding of Isaac was getting so much support, Edmund eventually released an expansion to the base game called "Wrath of the Lamb" which again, was made entirely in Flash. The game itself is a top down dungeon crawler, inspired by the original Legend of Zelda titles, that featured a lot of randomly generated content. Every single level in the game is different, as they have different maps, different layouts, enemy placements, items and bosses; and is the biggest reason why Isaac was so replayable. Below is a video showcasing gameplay from The Binding of Isaac, and I think watching it motion will really showcase the potential of Flash in full force.