He Created the Katamari Games, but They’re Rolling On Without Him
He Created the Katamari Games, but They’re Rolling On Without Him
Twenty years after his quirky project Katamari Damacy delighted the video game industry, Keita Takahashi is an independent designer who receives no royalties for his debut work.
I love Katamari. It's vibrant, it's weird and once you start rolling you get into the zone and time flies. I'm still playing the Katamari games regularly.
And FYI there are two recent remastered releases:
We Love Katamari is probably the best in the series IMO. Beautiful Katamari was later released for the 360, but felt much shorter and really didn't add much. A lot of the content in that one was locked behind DLC, too.
Beautiful Katamari was the first time I recall seeing controversy about on-disc DLC. You had to buy a few stages, including the one they advertised the most that went from like 1cm to rolling up the sun iirc, and all the purchase did was toggle a key that allowed you to play the levels which were already in your CD. It's normal now, but at the time I remember people hating it.
For what it's worth I liked We Love Katamari (and the original, which I only played once the re-release came out) much more than Beautiful Katamari! They tried to mix it up in Beautiful Katamari where you not only needed to roll a sufficiently large Katamari, but also it needed to be made of specific categories of items, and while this is fun for a few levels it ends up being boring when they do it for almost the whole game.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“I cannot forget that moment when everyone started laughing,” Takahashi recalled from his office in the garage of the San Francisco home where he lives with his wife, Asuka Sakai, a composer, and their two children.
A demo at the 2003 Game Developers Conference in San Jose caught the attention of industry leaders at a time when the market was mostly focused on multiplayer shooters like Medal of Honor and Halo.
There was no guaranteed global market for a game with a flamboyant deity known as the King of All Cosmos, who transforms katamaris into stars, replacing the constellations he accidentally hip-checked out of existence during a drunken pirouette across the universe.
“It feels like Katamari Damacy escaped Japan by accident,” said Paul Galloway, a collection specialist at the Museum of Modern Art who helped establish its video game program, which includes Takahashi’s debut.
Instead, Takahashi moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to help the co-founder of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, develop a massively multiplayer online game called Glitch.
The experiment fizzled out within a year, but the development team he left behind continued working on the internal communications system it had created for the game — a messaging program now called Slack.
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Oh my god, the creator of Katamari is (tangentially) related to the creation of the messaging program Slack. I was not expecting that.
Makes it so much more interesting when I think back to all of the days I turned off Slack to go relax with some Katamari Damacy Reroll!