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Bob's Game Gets Serious

Indie/homebrew DS developer stages a lock-in to get Nintendo's attention.

Remember Bob's Game? It's a DS game that's been developed by one man over the course of five years. Now he's finished with it, and wants to put it out commercially. There's only one small hitch... he hasn't been able to get approved as a licensed DS developer. So, faced with an increasing amount of silence from Nintendo's different developer resources, than man--25-year-old Robert Pelloni--has locked himself into a room with limited contact to the outside. That always works.

Maybe it's just the design of the site, but he's starting to really come across like a scary dude. Like, I'm starting to feel like if this 100 day lock-up doesn't work, he's going to kill Jodie Foster to get Reggie Fils-Aime's attention or something.

The thing I don't understand is what, exactly, he's hoping to do with the game if he gets ahold of Nintendo's official development tools. Is he willing to self-publish? Can he afford to pay the manufacturing costs associated with the minimum run of DS carts? Instead of bashing his head against the big Nintendo wall, why hasn't he found a third-party publisher that already has the means to produce a commercial product? With the weird level of buzz that this project has gotten, it seems like, at the bare minimum, someone like D3 or Atlus would think about picking it up. He's also stated that he might be willing to put it out as a downloadable DSWare game when the DSi becomes widely available, so maybe that might work for a one-man project?

Then again, he's also mentioned that he's working on a port of the game to Google's Android OS for phones. Since that's more of a self-publishing-friendly environment, that seems much more feasible than getting Nintendo's attention.

Still, despite feeling a little self-indulgent, the game does look kind of neat. Here's a video from August:

  

Jeff Gerstmann on Google+