Remember Noby Noby Boy?
I sure do. It remains one of the weirdest video games I’ve ever played. Today they just hit a milestone I never thought was possible.
The short version: Girl has reached Pluto. The last ‘planet’ in our solar system.
You may have forgotten what the hell that means or why it’s important.
If you ever played Noby Noby Boy you’ll know it’s about stretching. Stretching and little else. Noby Noby Boy was more like a weird Stretch Armstrong toy than it was a traditional video game with set goals. But Noby Noby Boy was measuring something: it was calculating the distance its players stretched — all of them combined — and calculating how long that distance was in relation to far you’d have to travel to get to various different planets in the solar system. The idea was that another character, called ‘Girl’, would represent that process visually in the game.
For example, in February 2009, four days after release, players had stretched their Noby Noby Boys far enough for ‘Girl’ to reach the moon — metaphorically speaking. The game’s creators thought it would take two weeks.
Back then it seemed inconceivable that players could travel to the opposite end of the solar system, but that’s precisely what has happened. Players have now stretched far enough to take the metaphorical ‘Girl’ all the way from Earth to Pluto.
Except for one little detail. Noby Noby Boy did receive a patch that sorta, kinda sped up the progress of ‘Girl’, which doesn’t completely negate the achievement, but also kinda does. Just a little.
It’s still pretty cool though.
And cooler still, the process doesn’t end here. Technically the journey is less than halfway over. Now ‘Girl’ will do an about turn and continue her journey until she heads directly into the goddamn Sun. ‘Girl’ will not stop moving until she is naught but molten lava and ashes.
What a way for a metaphorical character representing playtime to go, huh?
Comments
3 responses to “Remember Noby Noby Boy? It Just Hit A Super Cool Milestone.”
Wow, I had kinda forgotten about this game and it’s stretch goals, every pun intended.
From memory, they started applying some pretty large multipliers to people’s scores in order to get to the second planet. To get all the way to Pluto with a vastly smaller player base, the multipliers must have been increased enormously.
Yeah, was going to say, my mental math alarm was going off reading that article.
Just as a very quick estimation…
Earth->moon distance is 384,000 km. To travel that distance in 4 days gives a velocity of about 96,000 km/day.
This early at launch would have to be around the peak number of players in the game, at the very least I think it’s safe to assume that given the average playerbase over the last 6 years we can use this as an upper bound for velocity.
Since February 19 2009, there have been 2,469 days. Travelling at 96,000 km/day yields a distance of 237,024,000 km.
1 AU [distance between the earth and Sun] is about 150,000,000 km.
This means that using actual velocities, Girl would have travelled about 1.58 AU.
The distance to pluto is about 7,500,000,000 km, about 50 AU.
Yep, there’s definitely some multipliers in use there.