Bob, Bob’s Game & Nintendo: One Man, One Game, One Enemy

Robert “Bob” Pelloni, in his mid-20s, had an obsession in the early 2000s. He wanted to program the perfect game. Perfect by Peloni’s own standards, of course. For him it was an adventure with a contemporary setting, without monsters and fantasy elements, but with a huge, lively game world. The oblique Earthbound served as a source of inspiration, but also Cave Story, which was also created by a single developer and became a success. In 2004, Pelloni began work on his mammoth project. And that included teaching yourself the tools of a developer’s trade. Pelloni had no experience with it other than a coding class at school.

Also, he had never written music for a game or drawn graphics before, all of which he had to learn for Bob’s Game. Approaching publishers with a prototype or founding a team was out of the question for Pelloni. He wanted the title to be designed exactly according to his own ideas. And so from 2006 Pelloni devoted himself almost exclusively to the work on his video game, isolated himself and completely immersed himself in his task.

According to his own statement, the development until the game was officially announced took about 15,000 hours. Bob demonstrated that he had the qualities needed as a solo game developer: persistence, discipline, willingness to learn, and passion. It was other qualities that were later to be his undoing.

Several demos existed from Bob’s Game. We played and recorded one of them for the illustration of the article.

Source: Robert Pelloni

After years of toil, Bob officially presented his work online for the first time in 2008. The scenes were well received on YouTube: main character Yuu was seen exploring a huge city from iso view, complete with traffic on the streets and NPCs who seemed to follow their own daily routine. Buildings were not just accessories, they could be entered. School, hospital, church – apparently Yuu could also talk to all NPCs and examine each item.

However, the question in the room was what kind of gameplay the title would offer. The impressive world was just a showcase in the trailer – what would main character Yuu do in this city besides walking around and talking to other characters? And what is Bob’s Game about?

The clarification of these questions was initially secondary for Pelloni, he wanted confirmation of his conviction that the world had only been waiting for his work. As a huge Nintendo fan, there was no question that Bob’s Game would be exclusive to Nintendo hardware, specifically the Nintendo DS. According to his own statements, Pelloni rejected other publishers who approached him with interest. Instead, he offered his game to Nintendo.

In order to complete it and make the necessary adjustments to his desired hardware, he needed Nintendo’s software development kit. However, these tools and the debug hardware are not freely available, they are lent to developers by Nintendo, and the parties involved enter into a contract beforehand. If you can prove that you have already programmed and published games, you can also buy the hardware.

Since Nintendo does not simply provide the valuable tools to everyone, also to protect sensitive data such as the exact architecture of the hardware, newbie developers have to apply to provide the equipment. Nintendo referred Pelloni to various parts of the company, but promised to be able to say in six to eight weeks whether he would receive the required software and hardware. After 17 weeks of radio silence from Nintendo, Pelloni lost patience.