Sometimes all it takes is one paranoid schizophrenic locked in a pitch-black room for five whole years.
This is Bob's Game.
Robert "Bob" Pelloni spent five years working on a Role-Playing Game (RPG). He programmed the game, composed the music, designed the art assets, wrote the script, and handled what passed for the "business" operations. After failed attempts to be approved for a Nintendo development kit (tools used to prepare your game for a company's platform), Bob could have done any number of things: He could have released the game for free. He could have put it on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, the Apple App Store, Steam, or any of the other outlets that now exist for smaller/garage developers.
Instead, Bob began an extended period of attention-getting behavior to try and convince Nintendo -a notoriously arrogant company- to change its mind (Recall that Nintendo let Square take Final Fantasy VII -the most hyped game in the world at the time- away from the N64, rather than utilize disc-based media). When a company rejects your work, the rational thing to do is go onto other companies that might be inclined to accept it. Bob instead locked himself in his room for 100 days as a protest. When that didn't work (he caved on day 21), he took to posting personal information of Nintendo executives online. When that didn't work, he vandalized the flagship Nintendo Store in NYC.
Surprise surprise, none of this resulted in a deal with Nintendo.
After being rejected by his fetishized icon of childhood, Bob went nuts. He trashed his lair on webcam. He posted lengthy diatribes about how the modern games industry only cared for profit (no shit?). He changed great chunks of his game's script to be about a young developer who spent 5 years making his perfect game, only to be thrown to the wolves by an evil industry that cared only for profit. He posted maniacal youtube videos where he claimed that NoA president Reggie Fils-Aime and legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto were actually some sort of doppelganger "dark lords" who were keeping the "real" Nintendo of his youth hostage.
Bob claimed that he had written himself into Bob's Game as the end boss. Bob then claimed that all that talk about Nintendo had been a viral ad, and the vandalism video was a fake to troll the entire Internet. Bob the developer then claimed that he was now Bob the super villain, and that he had been purposely fooling people into thinking that Bob the developer was a gigantic liar.
At this point, Bob had pretty much given the impression that he thought he *was* the boss from his own game. Robert Pelloni had gone so insane that he thought himself to be a games industry equivalent of Tyler Durden.
As Bob's rants became more and more like the ravings of a madman, what supporters he had left became concerned for his sanity. Eventually, he posted something that sounded enough like a suicide note to prompt one of his forum dwellers to track down his sister to try and get Bob some help. Not long after that, viewers of Bob's webcam were treated to the sight of police breaking in his door to see if he was okay.
Unfortunately for Bob, other developers have made huge advances in pushing smaller, cheaper titles. Though he threatened to release the game into the wild many times (usually after a rebuff from Nintendo), nobody has yet proven they have played Bob's Game start to finish. Seeing as how there is a good possibility that the story of Bob's Game is more compelling than the gameplay of Bob's Game, it does not bode well that Bob's Game has now lost perhaps the only thing it ever really had going for it, Novelty: In the time Bob spent pulling increasingly creepy marketing stunts, Daisuke Amaya not only developed a game by his lonesome over the course of five years, but released it as freeware. It can now be had on multiple platforms, with an enhanced version being prepped as a boxed retail game for the Nintendo 3DS later this year.
Two developers, two labors of love, five years each. One of them has a game for a Nintendo platform, one does not. This is the ultimate tragedy of Bob's Game: It could have easily found a home elsewhere. If the game had done well on those platforms, it is likely that Nintendo - or another company with a Nintendo SDK - would have contacted Bob about retooling his title for port to the handheld.
It was Bob's fixation with Nintendo that ruined his dream, and his inability to see himself as anything beyond some kind of folk underdog. Sadly, Bob himself seems to be showing no signs of backing down: Rather than just release the game already, Bob's newest plan to stick it to Nintendo is a doozy - Pelloni claims to be releasing his own handheld game system, the nD (inDie, har har, get it?). Bob claims that the nD will be more powerful than any of the current handheld systems, but sold for $10. I think there might be a bridge in New York packaged with every box, as well.
And since every game console needs a "killer app" to drive sales, guess what comes preloaded on every nD? Yes, Bob's Game.
How does Bob intend on funding this project? It is a mystery. The nD website shows no investors, no committed industry partners, nothing much at all outside of a crude mockup video and a lot of pie-in-the-sky rhetoric and spec sheets. As best as we can discern through our hard-hitting Internet research, it is possible that Bob is being funded somehow, either directly or indirectly, by Tim Rogers - a 30 something year old games hipster who is somewhere between "comfortably entrenched in a luxury home near Pixar studios" (his words) and "independently wealthy" on the economic scale. Nobody really knows, because Tim doesn't post much about himself online. We know he has great hair, has some kind of a band, probably swapped body fluids with Leigh Alexander at some point, and spent a considerable amount of time in Japan. That's about all.
Regardless, it is likely that Tim has enough goodwill* among industry types to get funding for a project. Does he have the clout to get rational actors to throw good money down the hole to make tangible the ravings of a probable Asperger's patient with schizophrenia? Stay tuned, folks!
*(Tim Rogers' musings show us that he's probably a fun guy to drink with. Consider that Tim Schaefer still has a diehard cult among the game journalists, despite the fact that he hasn't made a relevant game since the 90s, and is now laboring on a Sesame Street Kinect game. This truth teachs us that the best way to get ahead in the games industry is to be a fun guy to drink with. Or maybe be named Tim. Perhaps both! This also explains why yours truly never landed a paid spot in the games journalism racket: Long ago, I pretty much fucked myself out of an honest to god Writing About Games For Money In A Big City position I was entirely qualified for by not being fun to drink with. To be brutally honest, I was neurotic little shit.)
Never change, Bob.
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