Noby Noby Boy players complete the journey to Pluto

Players of one of gaming’s more unusual titles have, years after the game was released, achieved what many thought would never happen.

Noby Noby Boy was the second game from Keita Takahashi, who is best known for 2004’s quirky PS2 release Katamari Damacy. After begrudgingly coming on board for 2005 sequel We Love Katamari, he then left the series in the hands of Namco Bandai.

His next title, 2009’s Noby Noby Boy, was even more bizarre. Some argued that it was barely a game at all. In it players were free to stretch a character named Boy around a selection of randomly generated levels. The total amount the character was stretched in each game session was uploaded as a numerical value to the game’s servers and added to the total length of another entity – Girl.

All those who play the game have their totals added to Girl. The idea was that players would work together to stretch Girl first to the Moon, then to Mars and beyond to the outer stretches of the Solar System.

Early on the developers decided to add a multiple to these length uploads for fear that Girl would never complete her journey.

Having racked through the first few planets in the game’s opening weeks, progress slowed after Girl reached Uranus at the end of 2011. In 2014 Neptune was reached and just this week Girl finally made it to (the now non-planet of) Pluto, some 2,468 days and nearly seven years after the game’s release.

That’s not the end of her journey, however. Girl is now on her way back to the Sun.

Having distanced himself from the games industry for some years, Takahashi’s next game Wattam is due out on PS4 next year.