Imagine barricading yourself inside your bedroom,
right? Like locking the door from the outside
and then broadcasting your own descent into madness
live to the internet. All just because a corporate
giant wouldn't answer your emails. It's wild.
It is completely wild. And that's exactly what
happened in December 2008. So today, we're taking
your stack of notes, old forum archives, and
the massive Wikipedia footprint of this unreleased
video game called Bob's Game. And we are diving
headfirst into the madness. Oh, yeah. I am so
ready for this. The mission for this deep dive
is to explore the incredibly chaotic intersection
of indie creativity, corporate gatekeeping, and
well... internet spectacle. What's fascinating
here is that this isn't just a story about coding
a video game. I mean, it's really a psychological
case study. Yeah, exactly. We're looking at what
happens when sheer unfiltered creative willpower
hits the immovable, entirely indifferent brick
wall of corporate bureaucracy. It's basically
the ultimate cautionary tale about the dangers
of working in a vacuum. Okay, let's unpack this
because to understand the barricaded door, you
know, we really have to understand the man who
locked it. Right. Robert Polony. Yeah, a developer
named Robert Polony. We're talking about someone
who spent over 15 ,000 hours, over five years,
building a game entirely by himself. Which is
just... staggering amount of time. It really
is. And he ends up locked in his room for a 30
-day protest, vandalizing a store, and publicly
claiming to be a better developer than the greatest
game designers in history combined. To really
grasp the scale of that obsession, we kind of
have to rewind to 2003 and 2004. Okay, set the
scene for us. So the Nintendo DS is just hitting
the market. and it's revolutionizing portable
gaming with its dual screens. And Pelloni is
talking with his friends, sketching out this
massive vision for a 2D role -playing game. But
he didn't want the standard fantasy stuff, right?
Like no elves, no dragons. Exactly. He wants
to set it in the modern suburbs, but approach
it with this really hardcore... Dungeons and
Dragons mindset. He's looking at classic games
like Earthbound and Super Metroid. No, absolute
classics. Right, but more importantly, he's looking
at a game called Cave Story. Cave Story. That
is basically the holy grail for solo developers.
It really is. I mean, it's famously created by
just one guy over five years, and it became a
massive hit. It proved that a single dedicated
visionary could theoretically rival a whole studio.
It did, and that proof really fueled Pelloni.
Like, we have to look at why he took this massive
burden on entirely alone. Right, because making
a game by yourself is a nightmare. Total nightmare.
Yeah. but he was looking at the games industry
at the time and feeling just incredibly disillusioned.
The standard practice for big publishers in the
mid -2000s was just churning out shovelware.
Oh yeah, the endless movie tie -in games. Exactly.
They'd take a generic clunky game engine, slap
some licensed movie assets on it to coincide
with the summer blockbuster, and just ship it
out. Just a total cash grab. Yeah, and to Polonyi,
that felt utterly soulless. He wanted to make
actual art. He wanted total creative control,
and he believed the only way to protect that
control was isolation. Total isolation. The sources
show he spent most of 2006 and 2007 completely
cut off from the world, just developing. Let's
just pause and think about that 15 ,000 -hour
number for a second. It's hard to even conceptualize.
It really is. Like, a standard 40 -hour -a -week
job adds up to about 2 ,000 hours a year. So,
Polonyi was effectively working a full -time
job, plus endless grueling overtime, for over
five years, entirely alone. No days off. No colleagues
to bounce ideas off of. Nothing. And the scope
of what he was doing manually is just staggering.
I mean, he created over 200 unique characters.
Wow. 200. Yeah. And he painted all the background
graphics himself, pixel by pixel. He even admitted
later that the art was the hardest part because
he had absolutely zero prior artistic experience.
That's insane. He was essentially learning how
to build the airplane while he was already in
a nosedive, you know, teaching himself coding,
animation, and game design all simultaneously.
It makes me think of an analogy. Imagine you
decide to build a sprawling, metropolis -sized
Lego city. OK, I'm with you. You spend years
in your basement, meticulously building skyscrapers,
subways, and parks entirely from scratch down
to the little plastic street lamps. Yeah, that's
exhausting. Right. But then you realize that
to actually display it to the public, you need
a very specific, highly proprietary brand of
glue to hold the foundation together. Ah, I see
where this is going. A glue that only one company
makes, and they just refuse to sell it to you.
It really makes you wonder, and I have to ask
you, at what point does admirable dedication
cross over into dangerous isolation? That pension
right there. is the central pillar of this entire
saga. Because all of that isolation, those 15
,000 hours of relentless coding, they meant absolutely
nothing without that proprietary glue. And in
Polony's case, the glue was the official Nintendo
software development kit. Right. Commonly referred
to as an SDK. For those unfamiliar, you know,
an SDK isn't just a suggestion box or a helpful
guide. It's the mandatory set of tools you need
to compile your work. You literally cannot bypass
it. Exactly. To put Bob's game onto a physical
Nintendo DS cartridge, Polony needed Nintendo
-specific software to translate his raw human
-readable code into the ones and zeros that the
Nintendo hardware can actually run. He needed
their blessing. He literally could not finish
the game without it. Which... drops him into
this devastating Catch -22. Nintendo's strict
corporate policy at the time was that they wouldn't
grant access to their SDK unless you had already
published a game. Oh, wow! But Polony couldn't
publish Bob's game, which was his very first
game, without the SDK. So he's just totally stuck.
And he also flat out refuses to go to a third
party publisher to bypass this rule, right? Yeah,
he wouldn't even consider it. Again, it comes
back to that obsessive need for creative control.
He didn't want a publisher owning the rights
to his life's work. He was so fiercely protective
of it. He even planned to replace the standard
end credits role of the game with a massive manifesto
summarizing how he made Bob's game all by himself.
Yeah. So bypassing the publishers, he tries to
go directly to Nintendo. And what follows is
just a master class in bureaucratic purgatory.
Oh, the corporate runaround. Exactly. In 2008,
Nintendo directs him to their Wario World developer
division. And Wario World tells him his project
is too ambitious for them, so they send him to
the marketing department. Of course they do.
Right. And marketing takes one look, says they
don't handle developer kits, and sends him right
back to Wario World. Just a perfect loop. Finally,
after endless emails, they tell him they'll give
him a definitive answer in six to eight weeks.
But six to eight weeks turns into 17 weeks? Yep.
nearly four months of absolute crushing silence.
Just sitting in that room, staring at his 15
,000 hours of work, waiting for an email that
simply isn't coming. Just agonizing. Now the
narrative that quickly formed online was that
Nintendo was this massive, evil, corporate bully
crushing the brilliant little guy. But I kind
of want to push back on that a bit. OK, let's
hear it. Is Nintendo really the villain here?
Think about it like trying to get a massive commercial
bank loan for a skyscraper. You walk in with
zero credit history, no collateral, you refuse
to co -sign with any established partners, and
you demand millions of dollars based purely on
your passion. That is a really fair point. It's
easy to look at it from Nintendo's side now,
but you have to remember the context of 2008.
Right, that early days of viral Internet outrage.
Exactly. The Internet loved David versus Goliath's
story. And Pelloni played that angle perfectly.
He made Nintendo look like this cold, faceless
machine trying to crush a starving artist. But
they actually had valid reasons. They did. If
you read the actual rejection letter Nintendo
eventually sent him, their logic is completely
sound. They explicitly stated they require secure
business facilities, sufficient equipment and
staffing, and financial stability. Which he obviously
didn't have. Not at all. They're dealing with
highly confidential proprietary hardware architecture.
They simply cannot hand out the keys to their
ecosystem to a guy working out of his childhood
bedroom, no matter how passionate or talented
he claims to be. So is it corporate bullying
or just standard industry security? I mean, if
you're Nintendo, you have to protect your platform.
Absolutely. You can't have unvetted, potentially
unstable code running on your systems and crashing
your hardware. But logic and corporate security
protocols didn't really matter to Polony anymore.
The silence from Nintendo was the spark that
just ignited his isolation. I weaponized it.
He really did. He turned it into a massive public
spectacle. On December 11th, 2008, he decided
he'd had enough of the waiting game. He barricaded
himself in his room for a planned 100 -day protest.
The details of this protest are just wild. I
actually want to read you his direct quote when
he launched this stunt. Oh, please do. He said,
I cannot leave this Viridian room. The door is
locked and barricaded from the outside. I'm sleeping
behind the camera, and yes, I've got a shower.
Food is delivered once a week by a friend. This
is my 100 -day protest to Nintendo. He deliberately
stripped away every single external distraction.
He removed his television, he cut off his own
internet access, leaving only a live webcam feed
broadcasting his room to the world. And a mobile
phone, right? Yeah, just for essential calls
and emails. But other than that, he trapped himself.
with nothing but his own thoughts and the code
for Bob's game. Here's where it gets really interesting.
Because if you look at modern internet culture
today, this sounds exactly like a Twitch sub
-a -thon. Oh my gosh, you're totally right. You
know, where a streamer locks themselves in a
room for 30 days and the audience pays money
to keep a timer going. It's usually celebratory.
Yeah, like a big community event. Right. But
Poloni wasn't doing this for subscriptions or
community building. This was fueled entirely
by pure grievance. It was like a hostage negotiation
broadcast live where he was both the hostage
taker and the hostage. The psychology of that
is just terrifying. You combine severe sensory
deprivation with an invisible silent audience
of thousands watching you through a webcam. It's
a recipe for a breakdown. It really is. And without
any external input to ground him. The situation
escalated incredibly fast. By day 21, which was
New Year's Eve, things took a very dark turn.
What did he do? He started threatening to release
the home addresses of Nintendo executives to
the public. He even sent a deeply sarcastic,
hostile holiday greeting to the president of
Nintendo of America. He starts actively threatening
their bottom line, too. He goes on forums and
claims he's translating the game into several
languages to release it worldwide on illegal
flash cartridges. Just to steal Nintendo's profits.
Exactly. He claims he's in secret negotiations
with Walmart. He threatens to po— the game to
every rival platform imaginable. Xbox Live, Arcade,
Steam, PlayStation Network, the iPhone. The grandiosity
just peaked on January 6th. He made a public
declaration that he was an objectively better
developer than Shigeru Miyamoto. The creator
of Mario and Zelda? Yes, along with Hideo Kojima,
John Carmack, and Will Wright combined. That
is quite the claim. He actually apologized for
that specific comment a couple days later, realizing
he'd crossed a major line with the gaming community.
But the erratic behavior just kept escalating.
Yeah, I read that on camera he was constantly
complaining about persistent paranoia and blinding
headaches. But you can't trick the human body
forever. The adrenaline of the protest eventually
wore off, and the reality of that sensory deprivation
set in. And then comes day 30. Right. January
10, 2009. The protest abruptly ends. He posts
this frantic message saying he has a wicked headache,
and then he physically ransacks his own room
on camera in frustration, just throwing things
around, and he declares total defeat. And because
he had been broadcasting this 247, he had an
audience watching this breakdown happen in real
time. Yeah, the internet was watching. Specifically,
the users on the 4chan message boards, their
video game board, saw the destruction. They saw
the sudden lack of movement on the webcam in
the hours that followed. And they got genuinely
concerned. Which is saying something. Think about
how extreme a situation has to be for 4chan to
intervene out of empathy. Right. I mean, 4chan
isn't exactly known for its warm, fuzzy, supportive
community. But a user there actually used a WHOIS
domain registry search to track down the personal
phone number attached to Polonyi's website. That's
some serious internet sleuthing. Yeah, and they
called his sister, alerted her to the broadcast,
and eventually the police were called to break
down the door of the Viridian room on January
11th for a wellness check. The police found him
physically fine, thankfully, but the psychological
aftermath of that room was incredibly bizarre.
He didn't just walk away, did he? No, he didn't
just stop developing the game to recover. He
took the trauma of the protest and injected it
directly into the source code. He actually made
himself the final boss of the game. Wow. And
he renamed the main villain, Gantendo, which
is a very unsubtle mashup of the classic Nintendo
villain Ganon and Nintendo itself. Yeah, not
subtle at all. And he named the protagonist Yu,
as in Y -O -U. It stopped being a quirky RPG
about the suburbs and Dungeons and Dragons. It
basically morphed into an interactive, playable
diary of his own personal vendetta against a
corporation. And that vendetta spilled back out
into the real world shortly after. A few weeks
later, Polony traveled to the Nintendo World
Store in New York City. Yeah. He actively vandalized
the store, leaving stickers and promotional material
for his game everywhere, and then posted a video
claiming that this vandalism was level 50 of
his ongoing protest. It's just nonstop. But just
when you think the story can't get any stranger,
we hit March 2009, and we get this massive twist.
A huge pivot. Polony sends a mass email to the
gaming press. He claims the entire thing, the
breakdown, the 100 -day protest, the Viridian
Room, the police wellness check, he claims it
was all a meticulously planned viral marketing
ploy. He called it an old -school marketing style
for an old -school style game. Do people actually
believe that? Well, he essentially told the press
that he had fooled the entire internet gaming
community. He even expressed disappointment that
the media preferred writing a story about an
angry developer littering at a Nintendo store
rather than just writing about an angry developer
sticking it to the man. I have to pose this question
directly to you, the listener. Do you actually
buy that? Was this an incredibly ahead of its
time, 40 chess viral stunt or was this a desperate
face saving retcon after a very genuine, very
public mental breakdown? Looking at the timeline,
the physical destruction of his room and the
actual police involvement, it is incredibly hard
to view it purely as calculated marketing. It
just doesn't add up as a prank. No. But regardless
of his intentions, the result was the same. He
had successfully alienated the gaming press,
who felt totally manipulated, and he had permanently
burned his bridges with Nintendo. Right, because
a few weeks after the protest ended, he finally
received that official final rejection letter
from Nintendo that we discussed earlier. So picture
his reality now. He has this massive game, 15
,000 hours of his life poured into it, and absolutely
no way to put it on Nintendo DS. He has to pivot.
And this pivot launches a decade of endless aftermath,
technical nightmares, and honestly, some of the
worst scope creep in the history of software
development. Oh, the scope kick is legendary.
Oh. In 2011, having been rejected by the hardware
giant, he announces he's just going to build
his own portable console. Think about the hubris
of that. You can't get your software published,
so you decide to manufacture hardware. It makes
zero sense. He called it the ND. He claimed he
was going to manufacture and sell this new handheld
console for just $20, and Bob's game would finally
be the launch title. $20? Yeah. He even uploaded
a flashy commercial for it during the Electronic
Entertainment Expo, the biggest gaming convention
of the year in 2011. A $20 console is an economic
impossibility. You can't even buy the raw materials
for that, and unsurprisingly, it never released.
By 2013, all references to the ND were silently
scrubbed from his website, just as if it never
existed. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
you start to see the fatal flaw in Pelloni's
methodology. Without a clear boundary, without
a publisher's deadline forcing him to ship a
finished product, the project just endlessly
fractured. He just kind of let it go? He couldn't
stop tinkering. Over the next few years, he decided
the game was too big, so he split Bob's game
into two entirely separate games. A puzzle game
and an action RPG. And to fund this new fractured
vision, he turns to crowdfunding. Late 2013,
he launches a Kickstarter for the puzzle game
portion. How'd that go? While the funding goal
was an oddly specific $6 ,667, he only raises
$477. Ouch. The campaign is a complete public
failure. Imagine pouring 10 years into a brand
only to have the internet collectively pledge
less than 500 bucks toward it. That has to be
devastating. But he pushes through and releases
the puzzle game anyway on the Ouya. For those
who don't remember the Ouya, it was a very short
-lived Android -based microconsole that also
failed spectacularly. Despite that first failure,
in 2014 he launches another Kickstarter, this
time for the RPG portion of the game. And his
pitch this time is just incredible. What was
the pitch? He says that if he gets the money,
he's going to buy what he calls a hack van. Literally
a van he can live and code out of so he can travel
around and finish the game on the road. And amazingly,
that campaign actually gets funded at the very
last minute. But a hack van doesn't magically
create a clean release. Definitely not. Think
about what living in a van actually entails for
a coder. You're dealing with unreliable power,
fluctuating internet access, and immense physical
discomfort. Is that glamorous? No. Over the next
seven years, the game just stumbles through various
unfinished states of existence. It gets green
-lighted on Steam, which is the biggest PC gaming
storefront, but only in an incomplete alpha form.
Right. The puzzle version drops on itch .io,
which is a grassroots marketplace for indie developers.
A full Steam release finally happens in 2017,
but it's a complete mess. The technical side
of this prolonged development is where the story
truly reveals its tragedy. In 2016, Pelloni actually
released the raw source code for the game on
GitHub, the massive online library where developers
share open source code. And what happened when
people looked at it? When other programmers finally
looked under the hood of Bob's game, they were
absolutely horrified. So what does this all mean?
Let's look at the technical footprint he left
behind. In his own developer notes, Pelloni admitted
that he originally wrote the game in the programming
language C. OK. Years later, he switched to Java.
And then he used an automated software converter
to translate his entire Java code base into C++.
Oh boy. Yeah. If you aren't a programmer, let
me explain why that is a catastrophic nightmare.
It really comes down to how different languages
manage a computer's memory. Like, Java has a
built -in feature called a garbage collector
that automatically cleans up memory you aren't
using anymore. It does the heavy lifting for
you. Exactly. But C++ does not have that. It
requires the programmer to manage memory manually,
line by line. So when you force a machine to
automatically translate Java into C++ I, it's
like translating a beautiful rhyming poem through
Google Translate five times. The basic syntax
might survive, but the soul, the rhythm, and
the underlying structure are completely destroyed.
The game couldn't run properly because the foundational
logic was essentially speaking a broken language.
It creates bloated, unreadable, tangled code
that takes longer to fix than it would to just
write it from scratch. It's the ultimate manifestation
of technical debt. Instead of building a clean,
stable architecture, he spent over a decade constantly
translating, rewriting, and porting the exact
same dream over and over until the original structure
was almost entirely lost beneath the patches.
The scope creep just swallowed the game whole
and the final whimper of this entire saga. In
June, 2021, Bob's game was officially renamed
on Steam. He changed the name. He stripped away
the title he'd fought for over 15 years and changed
it simply to OK, lowercase O, lowercase K. Wow,
just OK. Yeah. And shortly after that, the store
page was removed, completely vanishing into the
digital EFL. This raises an important question
about the nature of game development and really
any massive creative endeavor. What's the big
takeaway here? The story of Bob's game is a profound
cautionary tale. It highlights this intense,
often destructive, tension between having a massive,
singular, uncompromising vision and the actual
necessity of the practical, boring infrastructure
required to bring it to the world. You need the
boring stuff. You do. You need publisher approvals.
You need clean code architecture. Most importantly,
you need people to tell you no. Because without
those boundaries, the vision doesn't just stall.
It consumes the creator. It's the tragedy of
the Viridian Room. And it leaves me with a final
thought for you to mull over. We've spent this
entire deep dive talking about Bob's game as
a 2D RPG that Robert Polonyi was trying to code.
Right. But in the end, maybe the game he was
coding wasn't the actual product. Maybe the real
game was the multi -year, internet -wide spectacle
he created. That is a wild thought. The 100 -day
protests, the fictionalized corporate villains,
the absurd hardware announcements, the 4chan
interventions. Think about your own big projects
right now, the ones you've been putting off or
endlessly tinkering with. Are you actually building
the product? Or have you just become obsessed
with the performance of building it?