Noby Noby Boy
A stretchy worm-like character explores environments in a communal online game.
Noby Noby Boy is a video game for the PlayStation 3 and iOS, developed by Keita Takahashi and published by Namco Bandai. The PlayStation 3 version was released worldwide on February 19, 2009, followed by an iOS version on February 18, 2010. The title is a play on words combining the Japanese meanings of 'stretch' and 'carefree.'
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Namco Bandai Games
- Designer
- Keita Takahashi
- Released
- PlayStation 3
- February 19, 2009
- iOS
- February 18, 2010
- Genre
- Action
- Modes
- Single-player, multiplayer
- Platforms
- PlayStation 3, iOS
Facts from the source article.
Gameplay
The player guides a worm-like creature with four legs named Boy. The left analog stick on the controller moves Boy’s front half, while the right stick handles the back half. By pulling these two ends in opposite directions, the player can extend Boy’s body to enormous lengths. Boy can explore its surroundings, touching fixed items like houses or computer-controlled characters such as farm animals. The game awards points based on the total distance Boy stretches during play. These points can be sent online through a figure called Sun to another figure named Girl. All points submitted by players around the world add up, making Girl stretch further and open up new stages. Girl started on Earth and has since stretched to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto, then back toward the Sun, and finally back to Earth, with each milestone revealing fresh environments for Boy. The developers thought it would take players one to two weeks of combined playtime to get to the Moon, but the Moon was reached on February 23, 2009, just four days after the game came out. Mars arrived on May 23, 2009, Jupiter on November 20, 2009, Saturn by January 19, 2011, Uranus during the week of December 25 to December 31, 2011, Neptune around March 6, 2014, and Pluto on November 23, 2015. The next goal was the Sun, which required Girl to reverse course and cover all the distance she had already traveled, helped by multipliers that changed the stretch ratio, followed by a short victory leg to unlock Mercury and Venus, ending with a return to Earth. Girl finished her mission of bringing the whole Solar System together on December 14, 2015. The Sun was reached 2489 days after the game’s release, marking the official end, though the game remains playable. The creator, Takahashi, set aside special periods called Lucky Weeks, where each day a random number is picked and every length the player reports gets multiplied by that number. The first Lucky Week ran from May 11 to May 22, 2009, and Takahashi hinted at another one happening in June.
Development
The first public look at Noby Noby Boy came during Sony's PlayStation Premiere 2007 event in Tokyo, where Takahashi held up a silver stretch hose capped with two pink balls. He clarified this was not a controller but a visual prop to convey the game's concept, and a 30-second clip featuring the character Boy was screened. A playable prototype later appeared at the GameCity 2007 festival, where Takahashi also gave the event's Vision Statement. In this build, up to three Boys moved across a flat field filled with barnyard animals, using their stretchy bodies to snap, whip, entangle, and drag themselves. The Boys could swallow animals, which made their bellies bulge, and then whip the distended stomachs to the rear to expel the contents. At the Tokyo Game Show 2008, a second demo showed Boy navigating a two-dimensional maze whose walls were made of colorful blocks. Collisions with the walls caused the blocks to scatter, and after clearing the maze, Boy approached a title screen built from the same blocks, which also scattered. This left many attendees puzzled because it seemed to clash with the earlier gameplay engine, but it was later explained as a minigame accessible while the main game is paused. The game was originally built on an Xbox 360 development kit but moved to the PlayStation 3 because Takahashi preferred the symmetrical layout of that console's analog sticks over the Xbox 360 controller's design. An update on April 29, 2009, introduced offline multiplayer for up to four players, more in-game music, a feature that audibly pronounces the phonetic name of any object farted, a volume slider for fart sounds, new hairstyles for Boy's house, new bird thinking poses, and a hidden SYNCHROBOY mode: holding a specific button just before leaving Boy's house causes another Boy to appear and mirror the player's movements.
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