Game Over for Bob

You may remember the quest of Robert Pelloni, creator of Bob's Game. He's the guy who said he was going to sit locked in a room for 100 days or until Nintendo responded to his requests for the Nintendo DS SDK, allowing him to officially develop for the handheld. He's been working on a game--called Bob's Game--for five years, all by himself.

Over the course of the last month or so, the messages coming out of Bob during the sit-in became increasingly erratic and vaguely threatening, with Bob promising to release his game as a "killer app" for some sort of homebrew flash card device, and various references to Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime that, if I were Reggie, might have forced me to consider hiring a bit of personal security.

At the time, the whole thing looked like a desperate cry for help and a stalker/obsession scenario that inevitably leads to the death of a celebrity, a suicide, and then, of course, the eventual book deal and movie about the ordeal. It became pretty hard for me to tell if this guy was for real or if the entire thing was staged. Either way, it was all about calling attention to the situation. And either way, I increasingly felt that someone needed to break in there and get Bob out before he hurt himself.

Today, Robert Pelloni is out of his room, his lock-up is over, and the room now appears to be trashed. The last few days have been a series of message that alternate between vengeful and repentant, making it seem like the guy was losing it. I'd probably lose it a bit if I locked myself away for close to 30 days, but I guess I'm still skeptical about the whole thing. Was it ever for real? Bob claims it is. He also claims that he's realized that Nintendo is "just another heartless corporation, only interested in the biggest profits."

Finally, he's said something that's made some actual sense.

If this truly is for real, hopefully someone near Bob will get him some help. And I'm not talking about a meeting with Nintendo, or a lesson on what it actually takes to put a game on store shelves. But I still can't decide if any of this was for real to begin with... probably because I've long had ideas about wiring up a house with webcams, letting it run normally for a month or two, and then staging a bunch of fake murders and other stuff like that. To me, it seems just as likely that Bob's had a script for the full 100 days, but wasn't getting enough interest to maintain it.

What do you think? Think he meant it?

[UPDATE]: MatthewMeadows points out that you can totally see someone lying down in what appears to be the final shot. Hmm. Yeah. You'd think after playing through that photo-hunt game, Interpol, with Ryan that I'd be able to pick out something like that.