Rolando has been a long time coming -- we first heard about the game on a tip directly from Simon Oliver, the game's creator himself, while he was working with an unofficial iPhone development kit part time on a little physics-based puzzle game. And now, six months later, he's working full-time as an iPhone dev, his little game has expanded into a full-fledged story-driven platforming game with more hype and expectation behind it than perhaps any other App Store release, published by one of the biggest companies to come out of the iPhone gaming scene so far. Not to mention that the App Store itself has grown from a crazy experiment Apple thought up to distribute iPhone software, to a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

So today, on the release of one of the first games that really got us excited about the potential of the iPhone as a gaming device (yes, you can buy it right now if you want), we sit down again with Simon Oliver for an exclusive interview, this time to talk about the road he's traveled over the past few months, and how far both he and his game about little rolling "Rolandos" has come. He talked with us about the Ngmoco partnership and how it helped him as a developer, the viability of Rolando as a $9.99 game, and the future of both what he's working on and what the App Store needs as a gaming platform.