Bob's Game: Future Play-Asia Product?

Robert Pelloni has spent the last 5 years of his life making a game about Yuu. From the looks of it, it's a commercial quality title.


Click here for the high-quality version of the video

You can find more about Bob's Game at his website http://www.bobsgame.com/ or read more in the full article (link below) to get some more info.


Well, it's probably a lot higher than commercial quality compared to some of the garbage some game publishers try to pass off on us, but we try not to concern ourselves with those sort of titles here. He has done all the programming, all the artwork, all the sound effects, and all the music by himself. It is quite an achievement, but the ultimate goal for Bob is to get it into the stores and ultimately the hands of actual gamers.

As I mentioned, Bob has worked on this game for the last 5 years of his life. I don't mean that he came home each evening from his day job and spent his free time working on the game. What I mean is that he had no "real" job and no "free" time. From what I can tell, this game was his life for the past 5 years. He taught himself game programming, music tracking, and pixel art. It is quite an achievement. I've never seen a "homebrew" game programmer produce anything near this magnitude.

Now, Bob is trying to get his game published. To do that, he needs support from a publisher and Nintendo. To this point, he has not used any official Nintendo development tools, and Nintendo never seems to like playing with the little homebrew kids. They require that games be developed with their Nitro SDK, but to get that you need to be a Nintendo licensed developer. So far, they have not let poor Robert join in any of their reindeer games (by which I mean, they have not licensed him).

Bob's latest tactic is to hole himself up in his game development studio (also known as his tiny apartment room). According to Bob, "When Nintendo decides to approve my developer license application I will leave the room. I cannot finish "bob's game" for Nintendo DS until I have the Nitro SDK! I am supposed to receive a decision in 6-8 weeks. It has been 16 weeks!"

So, there the story sits for now. "Bob's Game" is pretty much complete. It just needs a publisher and some licensing. If you want to read more about this intriguing story, head over to http://www.bobsgame.com/. If you want to view some other videos of the game, check out Robert's youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/robertpelloni. If you want to know how to help, he has some instructions on his page about how to contact Nintendo to request that they license his development efforts.