Bob's Game (stylized as "bob's game") is a role-playing video game under development since 2003 or 2004 by independent video game developer Robert Pelloni. The project is most notable for Pelloni developing the game for the Nintendo DS, using open source software development tools, and Nintendo's refusal to license him the official SDK.
History
Development
Bob's Game was to be a 2D role-playing video game developed solely by Pelloni since 2004 for the Nintendo DS. According to an interview he gave to the Orlando Sentinel, Pelloni spent over five years and over 15,000 hours working on the game. The game was to feature over 200 characters and, according to the interview, "more gameplay than just about anything out there on the portable system." In August 2008, Pelloni posted a preview of the game on YouTube that had received over 100,000 views by September 15, 2008.
Development started as a result of a conversation about video games that Pelloni had with friends, discussing creating a video game based in the suburbs that had a Dungeons & Dragons mindset, similar to the EarthBound series. He also drew motivation from titles such as Super Mario 64, Super Metroid, the Dance Dance Revolution series, and a similar game developed by one person titled Cave Story. According to the Sentinel interview, Pelloni was fascinated by other similar video game projects getting published after participating in online Internet forums. At the same time, he was also "disheartened" over how the video game industry did business, saying that "it's a standard practice for some publishers to take a game engine and put in licensed assets to coincide with, say, a movie release for example." This motivated Pelloni to self-develop Bob's Game and, as a result, he spent most of 2006 and 2007 in isolation while developing the game.
Pelloni said that the hardest part of developing the game was the background graphics, as he had no artistic experience. He would not consider the game "100% complete" until he received the software development kit (SDK) from Nintendo, which would allow him to compile the game according to Nintendo's code specifications. However, he stated in the Sentinel interview, "[Y]ou can't get access to [the SDK] unless you've published a game before." Pelloni had received responses from some video game publishers but did not start talks with any of them as he wanted to retain creative rights to the game. As a replacement for the standard credits roll at the end of most video games, he said he would provide a summary of the making of the game.
Publisher rejection and protest
According to an article in The Escapist, in 2008 Pelloni was directed by Nintendo to talk to the WarioWorld division, which directed him to marketing; marketing then directed him back to the WarioWorld division. Nintendo told him that they would inform him of their decision whether to grant him an SDK for the game in between six and eight weeks. No response came from Nintendo. After 17 weeks of trying and failing to get Nintendo to provide him with the SDK, on December 11, 2008, Pelloni decided to publicly protest by locking himself in his room for 100 days or until Nintendo provided him with the SDK, whichever came first. According to Owen Good of Kotaku, he staged the protest in an effort to gain publicity by making Nintendo look like a corporate bully beating down on an indie game developer. His room had no Internet access (save for broadcasting a live feed of him in his room via a webcam) or television and had only a mobile phone with which he could make calls and send emails and the materials he needed to work on the game. Pelloni made the following comment when he decided to protest: