You know Edmund, you play his games, youve read his interviews. Like other members of the Isaac team, we wanted to give you an even deeper insight into who he is and what made him the game designer, husband and father he is today. Theres a lot to go over with Edmund, and I want you to enjoy every answer, anecdote and story he has to tell, so were breaking this one into a multi-part interview, covering a lot of his past, his upbringing and his origin as an artist and game designer. This is just the entry into the interview. I hope you enjoy it, please be sure to talk about it and discuss. And if you have questions for him, HMU on Twitter or just go directly to Edmunds Twitter. Lets get started... Whats your name? Edmund: Edmund McMillen. How do we know thats your real name? Edmund: You dont; you could be fabricating this whole interview. I didnt think of that. But this interview is real. Start the beginning for us. Edmund: I was born in Santa Clara. Just about 20 minutes from Santa Cruz.
Tell us about your family. Edmund: My parents were together until I was five. [My dad] is a preacher. I have a relationship with him. Its gotten better in recent years. We have a respectful relationship where he doesnt push anything on me and Im not critical of him. We both live our lives and check in on each other once or twice a year. I send him pictures of my kids and ask him what hes doing. Its nice. We had a difficult relationship when I was younger, but its become a mutually respectful, adult relationship as of the last seven or eight years.
Is your mom religious, too? Edmund: My mom grew up Catholic, but I would say shes not very religious anymore. But my grandma was super religious, very Catholic. Your Grandma Rodriguez, I love her last name. Edmund: [Laughs] To make Isaac you must have had some understanding of the subject matter. Where did that come from? Edmund: Grandma. I had seven years of catechism. I stopped at confirmation. That was the year that I told my mom in the drive-thru at Burger King that I wasnt sure that I believed in God and I felt it was disrespectful to continue to go to catechism when I didnt really believe what they were telling me. How did she take it? Edmund: Very badly. She cried before I got to order my Whopper.
Did you stop going to catechism? Edmund: I think right after that I said I wasnt going to do it. She had a fit about it for a bit, but then eventually warmed up enough for her to stop bothering me about it and didnt force me into it. Its one of the few things I put my foot down about when I was younger and said, I think Im old enough to say I dont want to do this anymore. I stopped going. I also did a summer of Catholic school. That was terrible. That was back when the nuns would hit you and stuff... [Peach enters the room. Edmund and Peach proceed to negotiate. Peach wins.]
You started your art very early. Edmund: I think by kindergarten people started saying I was good, so I wanted to do it more. Some of the fans who are reading this, they may not know about the talk. It involved a teacher expressing concern to your parents regarding your art. When was the talk? Edmund: Third grade. I just relived it recently because Ive been taking Peach to that playground. Since school is closed, its the safest park. Most of everything is exactly the same. And I walked by the place. Her name was Miss [Redacted] [not actually her name]. It was her first year of teaching. She had the most hellish boys in the classthere were some rough ones. For whatever reason she really hated me and had it out for me. She had multiple meetings with my parents and tried to convince them that I was completely disturbed and I needed to be mentally evaluated because something was wrong with me. To the point where they gave in; they had me evaluated. They also had me tested, [and it] turned out I did [have something wrong]. I found out I had dyslexia, because some red flags went up for certain questions. [So the] tests come back. Im not disturbed, I have dyslexia, but it turns out Im actually really smart, which angered her. Shes totally convinced somethings wrong with me, that I shouldnt be in the class. She just hated me; I dont know what it was, but she had it out for me. After that happened wed always play kickball. It was the last part of the class, but for some reason I really wasnt into it. I remember I was a big fan of red rover. The year before that, wed get to do that quite often. I was trying to plead my case and get her to alternate between the two games. Something other than kickball. Then she started mocking me in front of a group of girls: I dont want to play kickball! [Note: Edmund does the best whiney shrill voice at this moment.] I was so pissed. I got so pissed and I yelled at her, YOU SHADDUP! Instantly she turned red and looked evil. She grabbed me by my arm and she dug her nails into my arm. She slammed me up against the wall while these girls are watching and yells in my ear, DONT YOU EVER DARE TALK TO ME LIKE THAT AGAIN! And then she pushed me, walked away, then I splitI left school. I just made a beeline to the exit and waited where I knew my mom would come to pick me up. I showed my mom, I was bleeding from where the teacher had ripped me open. They had to call the authorities and the lady was fired. The first part of your story sounds like a scene from an Adam Sandler or Seth Rogen movie, but then it turned into a Stephen King story. Edmund: She was a horrible woman; she was totally, totally gone. She was young. When I was little she looked old to me, but my mom always referred to her as young.
Thats an easy way to make a child permanently dislike school Edmund: For whatever reason, I had teachers who either hated my guts or really liked me. It was love im or hate im. Fifth grade was the first time a teacher was super encouraging, but the bad thing is theres a chance he may have been a pedophile. Because in hindsight theres some weird stuff. He would get the kids to run faster by goosing [them]. But he was the nicest guy in the world! He was an artist himself and super encouraging. Wed listen to music together like REM and Queen. He brought an NES and let all the kids play an NES. The more I think about it Was this before or after the candy? Edmund: Looking back it was weird, but the other boys... later in life they would ask if I got invited to sleepovers at his house and laughed. This was like the coolest guy in the world, one of my heroes, but maybe he was just grooming me. But he liked my work and was very encouraging with my art. He was really into Mad Magazine and let me borrow them. Inside was a very graphic R. Crumb comic. I had a good teacher in second grade, though, a Japanese dude. I was very hyperactive and couldnt control myself. I cant remember what I was doing, but I wasnt doing the right thing. I was always bored, always doing something in my head. Maybe talking to myself or singing like Peach does. He was the first person to come up with a weird game plan, but it was so simple and worked so well. Each quarter of the year, you could go to the principals office five times and if you went more than that youd get suspended. And I always went five times and stopped. I got five times really early when I met this guy. I remember throwing some kids backpack down a hill and breaking his glasses, before he and I became friends. So this teacher put me on this thing where hed write me a note at the end of the day, Edmund had a good day with a stamp on it and I could show that to my mom. That was it. Simple. I wanted to collect as many slips as I could. And I remember my mom and Grandma would try to come up with, If you get [this many] slips you can get something. But I remember that didnt really matter, because I just wanted the stamps on the strips of paper. I still have a bunch of those. So then you get into middle school? Edmund: Sixth, seventh, eighth I went to New Brighton Middle School. I had hit puberty. I was only kind of bad my freshman year there, sixth grade. I was in the principals office a lot. At the end of that summer of sixth grade, I hit puberty and mellowed out and I wasnt hyper and insane anymore. I was more depressed and reserved. By the end of middle school and nearing high school, you must have been getting quite good at drawing. If you were like me, you were probably just drawing as much as you could. Did you find you were drawing more than studying at this point? Edmund: Oh, of course. I would find any excuse to draw instead of doing reports. By middle school and high school I really started to feel around and [ask] what do I have to do to draw? Like, whats the minimum amount of work I have to do? I found out early on you didnt have to do more than Intro to Algebra to pass. So you can throw the math away. You only have to do two years of art, but if you ask the teacher they can set you up as a miscellaneous elective and you can continue to do art. A lot of teachers would meet me halfway. I was the kid who was always bargaining: Can I do this instead of that? What are my options? Give me some wiggle room with this. I asked, What options do I have? and he asked What do you want to do? I asked him if hed give me credit for making a comic every quarter. Then Id hand him a complete comic every quarter and hed give me an A. I did that all the way until the end. I barely had any classes other than art classes my senior year. What comics were you reading from junior high through high school? Edmund: The Maxx. I went through a phase of obsessively buying Image Comics like Spawn and The Maxx and a few others. Me and my cousins were into collecting Nirvana B-sides and then Image Comics first editions. I was more into collecting them more than reading them and the only comic that ever really spoke to me was The Maxx.
As an artist, what did you think of artists like Todd McFarlane? What do you think about them now? Edmund: I still think the same as I did back then: It looks insane. I love the detail, the detailed work he does. I was also really into Lobo. Keith Giffen was the writer and he started drawing and did a series called Trencher which was like Lobo but a different character. I loved his art style a lot. And Simon Bisley was one of the original awesome artists for Lobo. I fuckin loved it; the Lobos Back series and Lobo: Infanticide, by Giffen. I loved anything I felt maybe I shouldnt be reading. I was exposed to R. Crumb at way too early an age. So I got a taste for the forbidden fruit, I guess. Looking back now, do you think being exposed to artists like R. Crumb and other risque art had an influence on some of your design such as your R-rated game? Edmund: Id say so. For me to like something, there always has to be impact. There has to be some sort of danger. If you look at a lot of Disney movies, they do a lot of fucked-up shit, [like] killing the mother. There has to be some darkness to pull people in. Its that kind of darkness that I feel I was obsessed with when I was youngthe unknown, dark, weird things, and I wanted to know why. In high school I was really into getting all the Faces of Death I could find. On VHS, of course. Edmund: Of course! [Note: Kids, VHS is like YouTube but inside a black cassette.] Thats all folks! Well, its not all, but in the next part of our interview with Ed well talk about what happened after high schoolhow he went from making tiny games to becoming the creator of hugely impactful games like Meat Boy, Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, and starring in your favorite Netflix movie.