the release of the sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, adventure games on the market had grown to include useful tools for players to collect and utilize in their environments. However, Crane found displayed tool inventories "not very elegant" and decided to implement tools in a different way. After coming up with the game's premise, a wishlist of the blob's object transformations was written and brainstormed with artists, who then converted them into computer graphics. Transformations were chosen based on how they would appear on screen due to the NES's graphical resolution. According to Crane, objects such as the bridge and ladder were "a must", but many ideas were scrapped because their nature would not be immediately obvious to the player. Puzzles that could be solved using the objects were created after the various shapes were finalized. A total of 14 jellybean flavors were implemented in the game. To ease the game's difficulty level, the flavors were named specifically as either puns or alliteration to help the player remember them. For instance, the punch-flavored jelly bean transforms Blobert into a hole, a play on the term "hole punch". A grape-flavored bean listed in the game's manual was only present in the version submitted to Nintendo. This flavor transformed the blob into a wall ("grape wall", a pun of Great Wall of China) which would repel enemies. A Boy and His Blob proved to be "one of the most played games at Nintendo" once it was submitted to the company. In this earlier version, the player character could potentially become separated from the blob, thus making it impossible to proceed. A senior management member of Nintendo viewed this as a bug, so Crane substituted the grape bean for a ketchup-flavored bean that would instead summon the blob (catch up) to the boy's location. A Boy and His Blob was officially licensed by Nintendo in the summer of 1989. Though standard NES games took six to eight months to develop, Imagineering completed A Boy and His Blob in a mere six weeks. Crane himself rented a room in a flophouse near his office and put in several 16- to 20-hour days of the work on the project. After going without sleep for 48 hours in its last two days of earnest development, Crane flew to the CES in Chicago for trade demonstrations, then spent nights at his hotel fixing bugs. The game was