A touching story from the heart.
By Alex Walker on August 28, 2014 at 8:00 am
From trash we go to treasure with one of the sweetest stories you'll read about all week. Edmund McMillen is the creator of Binding of Isaac, a roguelike dungeon crawler that even has popular competitive leagues, a rare thing for an indie game.
But McMillen wasn't thinking of those things earlier last week when Guppy, his beloved feline companion, passed away. Writing on the Binding of Isaac website, McMillen wrote that he first came across his pet while working as a county animal control officer. "On [August 19] we got a call for 6 kittens left abandoned in a planter box by a local theatre, the maintenance man heard them crying when he watered the flowers and called it in," he wrote.
Guppy was intriguing for his odd personality, McMillen added, having no great love for the outdoors, other human beings but being incredibly intense when he wanted to make eye contact. "Last week on the anniversary of the day we got him, Guppy passed away. Its [sic] hard to avoid the fact that such a significant part of our lives who was never intended to exists was with us for 12 years and left on the anniversary of the day we first saw him."
To honour his feline, McMillen has added Guppy's collar as an item within Binding of Isaac, giving the player a 50-50 chance of reviving in the previous room at half a heart.
It may not seem like much. It may seem irrelevant. And in the greater scheme of things, you could say anything we do for the dead ultimately is. They have passed on, while we continue to live. But remembering the fallen, whether they be animal or otherwise, also keeps us in touch with our humanity.
This is McMillen's tribute, a final contribution to an unexpected, but beloved, member of his family. I can't imagine Guppy's collar will become a prominent item on the Binding of Isaac racing circuit, but there's a good chance that anybody who encounters it now will think of the black and white rescue.
McMillen certainly will.
Source: Thanks, Kotaku!
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