The free updates were becoming more and more elaborate, and the question of a sequel has been looming. I guess I do my best."Īt this stage, McMillen is very aware of the crossroads facing Isaac. I'm not going to pretend that I do, but I try.
"I feel like he understands me in a way that I'm not completely aware of yet." Truong is considerably more modest: " don't always get what the game is supposed to be like. "There's a lot of great modders out there, but he's on a whole other level," McMillen says enthusiastically. During our interview, McMillen can barely restrain himself from singing the modder's praises, going so far as to call him the best collaborator he's ever had. It's a massive slab of new stuff, containing intuitive bosses and clever items built by Truong and his friends in their spare time. And I probably say that the first thing that I would do is strip out the story bosses Edmund McMillenĪnti-Birth is a testament to how inspirational Binding of Isaac has been. When people ask what would you do to improve the game, there's a bunch of stuff that I would do. "But we saw what that added and thought maybe we could use this as an opportunity to show what we could do."
"Initially I didn't want it to be anything too big, just a few items and enemies, and then Afterbirth came out and we hadn't finished our mod yet," Truong says of Anti-Birth. The-Vinh Truong, aka '_Kilburn', now an integral Isaac team-member, began as lead designer on one of the biggest mods, Anti-Birth. The modding scene blindsided McMillen, but has since become vital to The Binding of Isaac. "If you're like, able to theme it in properly, you can make it some pretty cool stuff by yourself, not really having to put in a whole lot of work." "It's so easy to mod and add stuff that you think might be interesting," he says. Hicks had run a modded Team Fortress 2 server for years, and wanted to help this community grow in the same way, working to preserve mods and encourage their creators. Through the 2014 remake The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and beyond, modding it has become easier and easier, drawing in more creators. The Modding of Isaac is a community forum for fanmade Isaac creations. "And I was like 'all right I gotta try this' and it was amazing." "I had some friends on Steam that were playing it and I was like 'What is this?' and I watched the trailer and it was very bizarre," he says. Ryder Hicks, owner of The Modding of Isaac, was one of them. Little did he know that a steadfast community was forming, and that it would prove integral to Isaac's longevity. "100-200 copies, 1,000 copies a day-that summer, the first summer after release, which was probably nine months after release, is when it just exploded, and it just kept climbing higher and higher and higher." McMillen remains at a loss as to why people enjoy watching it, but the benefits were quick and significant. Hours of videos demonstrating the ever-changing longplay aspect of Isaac on YouTube generated a sudden spike in interest. It wasn't until Let's Plays latched onto the game that things started to snowball.