Mewgenics might have surpassed Hades 2 as the most-played roguelike on Steam, but co-creator Edmund McMillen says that the entire genre used to be the reserve of "the nerdiest of nerds" before he helped contribute to its modern popularity. "I really loved it, I really loved the genre," he says, while also admitting that "the barrier of entry for those types of games is that people didn't play them because they were so abstract, and some of them didn't have any visuals at all, and only the nerdiest of nerds would entertain that stuff." "We could have just made The Binding of Isaac 2," say Mewgenics creators, and "gotten 20 million wishlists" Mewgenics eyes Steam roguelike record held by Hades 2 as the cat breeding sim surpasses The Binding of Isaac Mewgenics surpasses Hades 2's concurrent player peak on Steam, lead says it's "possible" roguelike hit Megabonk is next Spelunky, he says, was the game that allowed the roguelike to break free of its 'nerdy' reputation - Yu took the format of Stone Soup and matched it with the platformer stylings of games like Spelunker and Mario, "and it worked so well. To me, it felt like this was the new arcade game, the new Pac-Man, the new Donkey Kong. Suddenly, scores matter again. Lives mattered again. Everything mattered. And it was so cool that you could have an endlessly replayable game like that that felt so dynamic and neat." After Yu proved the idea could work, McMillen says he "knew right away that this was just the beginning," and thought that "everybody in the world was just going to go and grab onto another genre and do it." For McMillen's part, he took the Zelda-esque dungeon crawler and "jumped in with Isaac." As that quickly became a major indie hit in the early 2010s, combined with Spelunky's console release, he says "that established the action roguelike genre." McMillen's development partner on Mewgenics, Tyler Glaiel, admitted that the genre had "exploded over the last 10-15 years," to the point that the roguelike is barely even a genre at all anymore. "It doesn't feel like a genre to me, it feels like a structure - it's not that rigid a thing. Genres aren't really that rigid anymore, but it does feel like you can put any genre you want on top of the roguelike structure, and have something interesting. They just don't get boring." Mewgenics could earn McMillen a second entry on our list of the best roguelikes.