Since we first covered Bob's Game back in September, developer Robert Pelloni has run into a brick wall. After a series of contacts with Nintendo reps that culminated in a face-to-face GDC meetings, his attempts to purchase an official dev kit so he can finish his title and get it ready for official publishing has not been fulfilled. Nintendo hasn't refused Pelloni a dev kit in formal terms, the company simply isn't telling him anything.
Pelloni is currently on day 21 of a protest against Nintendo, wherein he barricades himself in his room with only his phone to connect him to the outside world (and give him 'net access). He's using his website as a soapbox (scroll way down to see his News updates), and the confinement seems to be getting to him already. In his latest 12/31 newspost, Pelloni has made two outrageous claims involving Nintendo.
The more minor of the two is the allegation that Nintendo is hiring groups of hackers scan his servers illegally and run DDoS attacks against his site. The whopper is an outright threat to bundle a version of Bob's Game as a "killer app" with a DSi-compatible flash cart of the sort used both to run unlicensed homebrew and to pirate licensed Nintendo software.
At this point it's very hard to tell if Pelloni is serious about this claims, or succumbing to paranoia and other emotions that might assault someone who's been locked in a room for 21 days. In his 12/28 news update, Pelloni claims that he believes his application for a dev kit is being stalled maliciously by one Tom Prata, Senior Director of Project Development for Nintendo of America.
Pelloni alleges that Prata's motivation for stalling his application for dev kit is personal spite. Pelloni alleges that his creation of a Nintendo DS title by himself, without any tools supplied by Nitnendo, embarrassed Prata. As you might recall, Prata announced via an interview with IGN that Nintendo would be opening their hardware to small developers for the first time with the WiiWare service at the last GDC, and the upcoming DSiWare service for the Nintendo DS is expected to work similarly.
Prata has yet to make any public comments about Pelloni, his game, or the situation, but other journalists like MTV's Patrick Klepek have pointed out that Pelloni's protest is extremely ill-timed. Industry executives tend to go on long vacations and become very difficult to reach during the holiday season, often because they want time away before dealing with the busy Spring release period. It is very likely that Prata has no idea that the Bob's Game protest is even happening.
Much like my colleagues over at DS Fanboy who are reporting on Pelloni's very strange recent site update, I'd like to urge Pelloni to reconsider and possibly retract his remarks about Prata and supporting the spread of DS flash carts with an unlicensed release. Issuing threats only puts Nintendo in a situation where it is impossible for them to give him a dev kit without losing face, and may damage Nintendo's willingness to deal with small, independent developers in the future.
EDIT: Just in the first few hours since I posted this stuff, Pelloni has removed the news updates concerning Nintendo and Tom Prata entirely from his site. Right now it is only two web cams and a few title heads' worth of text. Not sure why or if the old page is coming back, but it's worth noting that if you go looking for the news posts now, you won't find 'em.
EDIT 2: The site is back to the way it looked when I originally reported this, but Bob has annotated most of his news posts since Christmas with new comments in red. In some cases he tries to soften his hostility, and others he's clearly mocking the idea that Nintendo isn't suppressing his game intentionally. There's also a new 1/01 news post where he states unambiguously that he does not want to support flash carts because they undercut the efforts of all developers, but will do so anyway if Nintendo does not give him access to legitimate methods of releasing his game.
