The Binding of Isaac sends a frightened child into a basement after his mother believes she has been ordered to sacrifice him. The rooms beneath the house become a changing dungeon of monsters, bosses and objects that alter Isaac’s body and abilities. Its grotesque setting gives a personal character to a familiar task: survive long enough to discover what lies further down.
Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl released the original game on Steam on 28 September 2011. Danny Baranowsky wrote its soundtrack. The later Rebirth is a separate remake, developed by Nicalis with McMillen, rather than an expansion of the original Flash program.
Building another attempt
The game combines real-time shooting with randomly arranged dungeons. Items can change what the character can do as well as how he looks. Unlockable characters, items and enemies expand what future attempts can contain. Losing a run therefore does not mean that the whole game returns to its original set of possibilities.
In his 2012 postmortem, McMillen explained that he wanted to combine The Legend of Zelda’s dungeon structure with a roguelike. He also wanted to explore his relationship with religion. The prototype began during a week-long game jam with Himsl, followed by roughly three months of part-time work in Flash’s ActionScript 2.
McMillen said he expected a niche audience; his description of designing for failure concerned mainstream commercial expectations. He reported more than a million PC and Mac sales in the first year. That is the developer’s account of the result, not an independent sales audit.
Two versions, two expansion lines
Wrath of the Lamb, released in May 2012, expanded the original game. McMillen’s postmortem also described performance and development problems with Flash. A new version offered a way to revisit the game beyond those constraints.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth arrived on Steam on 4 November 2014 with a new engine, pixel artwork, controller support and local two-player cooperation. Its new soundtrack was by Ridiculon, Matthias Bossi and Jon Evans. Nintendo’s European catalogue records a New Nintendo 3DS edition on 29 October 2015; the earlier difficulty getting the original game onto Nintendo hardware was not a permanent exclusion of the series.
Rebirth’s Steam expansions followed their own sequence: Afterbirth in October 2015, Afterbirth+ in January 2017 and Repentance in March 2021. Alongside additional content, Afterbirth+ supplied tools for making mods.
The Steam release of Repentance+ followed on 18 November 2024. Its online mode supports groups of up to four players. The download is free, but its product page requires Rebirth and the preceding expansions; it is not a standalone free edition of Isaac.
Sources
- Publisher’s original Steam page: release, credits, premise and unlockable content.
- Edmund McMillen, “Postmortem: McMillen and Himsl’s The Binding of Isaac”, Game Developer, November 2012; web publication 28 November: firsthand design, development and sales account.
- Danny Baranowsky’s soundtrack release, 28 September 2011: original music credit.
- Steam, Wrath of the Lamb release announcement, 28 May 2012.
- Publisher’s Rebirth page: engine, artwork, music, features and release.
- Nintendo, Rebirth for New Nintendo 3DS: European release date and supported system.
- Publisher’s Steam pages for Afterbirth, Afterbirth+, Repentance and Repentance+: dates, mod tools, online play and dependencies.