Keita Takahashi’s (Katamari Damacy) Noby Noby Boy was first released in February 2009. After 2489 days of players stretching across the Solar System, the game has now finally come to an end.
It worked like this: anyone playing the game at home could stretch a little guy’s (his name was literally BOY) torso out like an accordion and move him around. It was cute, and it was fun. But in the background, a metagame was also being played: Noby Noby Boy was tallying the length of everyone’s stretching and adding it to a cumulative figure.
That figure was represented by another character, GIRL, who like BOY could also stretch. Only she was stretching across the Solar System. Slowly, as weeks bled into months and then years, GIRL made her way past planet after planet. She touched Uranus in 2011. Neptune in 2014. Pluto last month.
Today, after some tweaks were made to the game’s multipliers (not the first time this has happened to speed things up), GIRL reached Mercury, Venus and the Sun all at once before returning home, bringing her epic journey to an end.
Which is cheating, I know, but whatever. Over six years in deep space was enough for the poor thing.
Upon reaching the milestone, this cutscene played:
(If you want to read the letter at your own pace, it was captured by @KatamariItems and is below)
God, I hope that really was written in 2009. It’s like a digital time capsule.
In celebration of the achievement, here’s a video Takahashi shot for the game’s iPad launch in 2010. It remains the best video I have ever posted on this website.