Soulja Boy Was Right

10 May 2025, 11:06 by Mors

Back in 2012, a little documentary called Indie Game: The Movie was released. It followed the tortured geniuses behind Super Meat Boy, Fez, and Braid, and basically served as a love letter to the act of independent game development. You can watch it on Steam if you want to relive the era when releasing a 2D platformer meant you were a visionary, not just a guy with Unity and two weeks off work.

I was just 14 when the movie came out, and I believe I didn't watch it until about a year later. By that point I had already been using GameMaker for years, making my own original (and really shitty) games. A lot of people think I started game development with fangames, and sure, I did make plenty of those between 2010 and 2020, but before that I was actually making more original stuff! You know, stuff inspired by what you'd see in the old Yoyo Games Sandbox.

So when I heard there was an entire movie about people making games like that, especially one featuring Super Meat Boy, a game that had been a huge inspiration for me, I was immediately interested.

Watching it left a bit of an impression on me. It was the moment I began to seriously consider indie game development as a career, rather than simply aiming for a general path in software engineering. Up until that point, I hadn't really thought of the things I was making as “real games”. They felt more like small hobby projects, not the kind of work people pour years into, release on actual consoles, or earn a living from. I wanted to do all that, even though the movie didn't shy away from showing just how difficult the journey was for them.

Mario in the future

One of the most memorable moments in the movie is when Jonathan Blow discusses how the success of Braid affected him emotionally. Not because the game was received poorly or anything, oh no, people absolutely loved Braid. It was precisely because of that overwhelming praise. To quote him directly:

You know, when you work a long time on something really intricate like that, there's a hope that people are gonna understand, you know, the things that you did, and that you'll have some line of communication with your audience and things like that. And some of the actually most demoralizing things were actually positive reviews of the game. The game would come out, and people would say, “Oh, this game's great”, you know, “nine out of ten” or “ten out of ten”, and they'd say what's good about the game, and in many cases, it would be just a very surface understanding of the game that didn't even see what I thought was most special about it. Not that many people understood, and that was a little bit heartbreaking. In a way it's like, I visualized that I was going to have some kind of connection with people through this game, and they think it's great, but the connection isn't there because they're kind of living in a different world still.

So they think it's great for some of the reasons that I do, but not for other.

They're not seeing the most important thing.

The movie then cuts into a video uploaded to YouTube by Soulja Boy (yes, the rapper), where he's playing Braid and seemingly having the time of his life.

While Blow contemplates the emotional toll of creating something as personal as Braid, Soulja Boy provides his own uniquely insightful take on the game:

There ain't got no point to the game. You just walk around, jump on shit. He look like Mario in the future. It is Mario in a business suit, and he just walk around jump on shit. But what's the fun part about it, you can do this right here, watch this…

He then jumps down a pit, starts rewinding time, and watches “Mario in the future” as he slowly rises back to the top.

Now if you didn't catch that, I just went back in time. He just be goin' back in time, watch this shit.

He then goes back to messing around with the game's mechanics while laughing hysterically. With that, the documentary cuts to the iconic shot of Jonathan Blow in a dark room, sitting on a chair, in the most dramatic way possible.

What's funny is that the movie presents this Soulja Boy clip almost as a punchline, an ironic juxtaposition to Blow's heartfelt monologue about the emotional toll of game development. It's edited in a way that implies Soulja Boy is hilariously missing the point.

I mean, it is hilarious, I won't lie, but I'd also argue that he isn't actually missing the point. He's right.

Soulja Boy tell 'em!

Once a piece of art (whether it's a game, movie, or a book) is released into the world, its meaning is no longer controlled by its creator, but rather those who consume it. This is called “death of the author”, and no, it's not actually about the cancel culture. The argument here is that once a work is created, the author's intentions and interpretations should not hold ultimate authority over how that work is understood.

As Roland Barthes, the person who came up with the term, puts it:

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Essentially, meaning is not something fixed by the creator, it's something fluid, produced by the reader (or player, in this case), shaped by their own context, their own feelings, experiences, and imagination.

So while Jonathan Blow might have had a specific vision for what the game meant (a commentary on obsession, time, or even nuclear weapons), it's not the only one. Once the game left his hands and entered the world, that interpretation became just one among many. So when Soulja Boy plays Braid, calls the main character “Mario in a business suit”, and finds joy in just rewinding the time, he's not doing a “wrong” reading of the game. It's just his own reading, as valid and valuable as any other.

And it's valuable not despite its difference from Blow's intentions, but precisely because of it. He cut straight through all the pretentious crap and approached the game in a literal sense. In doing so, he experienced the game on terms that were true to him, and came out having more fun than anyone has ever had playing Braid.

I think this is something every game developer needs to come to terms with. Like, look at fangames and mods! Some games build entire communities around them, where people create new stories and mechanics on top of the foundation you, the designer, created. You can either see those as “corruptions” of your intended vision, or different interpretations by people who appreciate your work. The choice is yours.

Of course, one could argue that authorial intent can add valuable context and deepen the meaning, but the issue is that nobody playing a game for the first time will be thinking about those things. That kind of reflection comes with time, with deeper analysis, and only informs the experience, doesn't define it. If your work can't be interpreted in more than one way, if it requires a specific understanding to function properly, then you didn't really create art. You just made a statement.

So yeah, Soulja Boy was right. Maybe not in the way Jonathan Blow intended, but in the way that actually mattered.

Watch me crank it, watch me roll

A quick side note on Jonathan Blow himself, he was once seen as kind of a genius within the larger game development scene. You know, the face of independent game development, a “true artist” in a world full of AAA devs making toys. That view is mostly gone these days. His follow-up game, The Witness, was technically impressive and was critically well received, but it also quickly gained a reputation for being unbearably pretentious at points. So much so that it even inspired an excellent parody called The Looker. He also released a remaster of Braid recently, one Blow himself isn't shy to admit that sold “terribly”.

But he's probably most controversial these days for his political views. I remember just a few years ago he had made a tweet showing his distrust in the popular narrative surrounding COVID, spreading some rather questionable views. I actually quoted that tweet, just saying “Soulja Boy was right”. It was supposed to be a joke mostly, and I wasn't really expecting him to see it.

Yet he did, and I got blocked by him.

Even though his work was partially responsible for getting me into serious game development, it somehow didn't sting. I guess I don't need to agree with his personal views, or even like him as a person, to recognize the impact of the Indie Game Movie on my own creative path.

After all, once a work is out in the world, it belongs to its audience.

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