() is a 2004 action puzzle video game developed and published by Namco for the PlayStation 2. The game's plot concerns a diminutive prince on a mission to rebuild stars, constellations, and the Moon, which were inadvertently destroyed by his father, the King of All Cosmos. This is achieved by rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects, ranging from thumbtacks to human beings to mountains, until the ball has grown large enough to become a star. Katamari Damacys story, settings and characters are highly stylized and surreal, often both celebrating and satirizing facets of Japanese culture.
Designer Keita Takahashi struggled to pitch the game to Namco's superiors, eventually seeking student aid from the Namco Digital Hollywood Game Laboratory to develop the project for less than 1 million. As director, Takahashi emphasized concepts of novelty, ease of understanding, and enjoyment.
Katamari Damacy received critical acclaim, becoming a surprise hit and winning several awards. Its success led to the creation of the greater Katamari franchise, and inspired numerous subsequent games imitating its quirky, colorful charm. Certain critics have hailed it as a cult classic and one of the greatest video games of all time, praising its gameplay, replay value, humor, originality, and Shibuya-kei soundtrack. A high-definition remaster of the game, was released by Namco's successor Bandai Namco Entertainment for Windows and Nintendo Switch in December 2018, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in November 2020, and Google Stadia in September 2021.
Gameplay
The player controls the Prince as he rolls the katamari around houses, gardens, and towns in order to meet certain parameters set by the King of All Cosmos. The player uses the two analog sticks on the DualShock controller in a manner similar to the classic arcade game Battlezone to control the direction the katamari rolls. Other controls can be triggered by the player to gain a quick burst of speed, flip the Prince to the other side of the katamari and more.
Objects that are smaller than the katamari will stick to it when the player comes into contact with them, while greater objects can be hurdles; colliding at high speed with any may cause objects to fall off the katamari, slowing the player's progress. The game uses size, weight, and surface area to determine if an object will stick to the katamari. This allows slender objects, such as pencils, that are longer than the katamari is wide, to be picked up, and these will alter how the katamari rolls until more objects are picked up. Animals such as cats will chase the katamari, knocking things from it, but once the katamari is great enough, it will scare the animals away, and they can be rolled up once they are chased down. As objects stick to the katamari, the katamari will grow, eventually allowing objects that were once hurdles to be picked up, and creating access to areas that were formerly blocked. In this manner, the player might start the game by picking up thumbtacks and ants, and slowly work up to the point where the katamari is picking up buildings, mountains, and clouds.
The typical mission given by the King of All Cosmos is the "Make a Star" mode, where the player needs to grow the katamari to a specific size within a given time frame. Other missions have more specific collecting rules, such as collecting as many items (swans, crabs, pairs) as possible within a given time, or collecting the largest item possible (such as a cow or bear). The player can attempt a score attack mode for any level, where the goal is to make the largest katamari possible in the time allotted. Certain levels can unlock an "eternal mode" by creating an exceptionally large katamari. In eternal modes, the player can explore the level with no time limit.
Each level features two secret items that can be found. The first item is a royal present that contains an object that the Prince can wear. Most gifts are non-functional, but one includes a camera that can be used to take in-game screenshots. In the two-player mode, a player can choose to play as either the Prince or one of his numerous Cousins. The screen is split vertically; player one on the left and player two on the right. Players compete simultaneously in a small arena to collect the most objects within three minutes. The playing field is replenished with new objects periodically. Players can ram into each other, knocking items from their opponents' katamaris, and if one player leads by a fair amount, then it is possible to roll up the opponent's katamari.
Plot
In a drunken stupor, an eccentric, god-like entity called the King of All Cosmos destroys all the stars, Earth's Moon and other such celestial bodies in the universe, except for Earth itself. Despite acknowledging his mistake, the King charges his five-centimeter-tall son, the Prince, to go to Earth with a "Katamari"—a magical ball that allows anything smaller than it to stick to it and make it grow—and collect enough material for him to recreate the stars and the Moon. The Prince is successful, and the universe is returned to normal.
A side-story follows the Hoshino family as the Prince works at his tasks. The father, an astronaut, is unable to go to the Moon after it is wiped out by the King, and the daughter, whose name is Michiru, "senses" the Prince's work—she can feel when each constellation returns to the sky. Ultimately, the family, along with their house and town, are rolled up in the katamari that is used to remake the Moon.
Development
Keita Takahashi entered Musashino Art University to study sculpting in 1995. During his studies, he came to a philosophy that his art needed to combine practical elements along with a bit of whimsy and humor. After graduation, Takahashi no longer had the desire to pursue sculpting as a full-time career, and saw the potential to become involved in video games as a means to continue his art interest in a larger medium. Joining Namco as an artist around 1999, Takahashi worked on a number of smaller projects for the publisher. One of these was called Action Drive, inspired by Crazy Taxi but with more spy-based elements atop the driving gameplay. During this, Takahashi came up with the ideas of the characters that would be central to Katamari Damacy: the King, the Queen, and the Prince of all Cosmos. His idea would have been that the queen had been kidnapped by agents on Earth, and the lazy King sends the Prince to rescue her. To do this, the player would use the diminutive Prince's head, shaped like a hammer, to stun humans, after which the Prince would then "drive" the humans around by putting a steering wheel on the back of the human's head. Takahashi felt this would lead to interesting and creative gameplay, allowing the player to create havoc as the Prince followed the misguided suggestions from the King, but the project leader rejected the idea. Action Drive was eventually cancelled.
While working on other projects, Takahashi continued to try to think of game ideas, seeking to grow beyond being just an artist for Namco. Takahashi cited two concepts that led to the inspiration of Katamari Damacy. The first was a prototype shown by Sony Computer Entertainment called Densen (Japanese for "power line") that had the player as a young girl traverse floating islands of various homes connected by power lines. The game, though never released, gave Takahashi the idea that the ordinary world could be made interesting with only small changes to perception, and that a game could be fun without the need to cause violence. The second idea was from the game of tamakorogashi played in Japanese school's undōkai or sports days. In tamakorogashi, students attempt to push a giant ball into a goal. Both those ideas led to him thinking of a game where spinning a ball would roll ordinary objects into it, making the ball larger and larger over time. The evening he conceived of this idea, he spoke to a friend, one of the game designers in Namco, to see if it made for a good game idea, who agreed it had potential. The next day, he spoke to his former boss, Mitsutoshi Ozaki, about the concept, further adding a way to reuse the King and Prince characters he had previously proposed, who also agreed it would make for a great game.
As Takahashi was in Namco's art department and not in game design, there was no easy route for him to propose this idea to Namco's superiors. Ozaki suggested a novel approach for Takahashi through the Namco Digital Hollywood Game Laboratory. At the time, Namco had been following in the model that Konami had used in 1997: Konami established the Konami Computer Entertainment School to help educate new game developers which were eventually hired in Konami, and several of the experimental ideas founded by the School during this time became products within the Konami Games & Music Division (later, Bemani) that were highly successful, including Beatmania, GuitarFreaks, and Dance Dance Revolution. Namco hoped the Digital Hollywood Game Laboratory would follow a similar path. At the time, Masaya Nakamura was principal of this school, and oversaw one senior thesis class where the students were being trained on 3D modeling towards producing a game prototype with the help of other Namco employees, which could potentially be made into a full game. Ozaki suggested to Takahashi that he could have the students of this class create the 3D objects needed to populate his game world.
Takahashi took Ozaki's advice, joining the project to help produce the prototype for his game. Alongside about ten students from the Digital Hollywood program, he had been able to gain some visual design artists from Namco to help with the prototype but had difficulty in getting any game development engineers, due to the low priority of the school. He was fortunate to find that some of the engineers from Namco's arcade game division were going to be laid off, and he was able to convince three of them to join his team to retain their jobs within Namco.
One initial difficulty faced in developing the prototype was their choice of platform, the PlayStation 2. At the time the project started, Sony had just announced the specifications for the console, which was built from the ground-up to support 3D graphics via the Emotion Engine, but the company did not provide any updated software development kits, believing that developers would be able to figure out the hardware. As a result, the console was difficult to develop for at its launch. In contrast, Nintendo had recently announced the GameCube and that it would provide more developer-friendly features in contrast to the previous Nintendo 64 console. Thus, Takahashi's team decided to develop for the GameCube for their prototype even though the final game was expected to be a PlayStation 2 release. In creating the prototype, Takahashi had envisioned that while the ball the player rolled around would grow as they rolled over objects, it would also shrink if they collided with obstacles and lost objects from it. This would have been tied to an interactive music track, which would have started off simple with a small ball and become more complex and full as it got larger. Technically, the team found they could not implement this shrinking mechanic due to memory limitations, and further found that with the interactive music concept, it was not fun to shrink back down and hear the music regress to a simpler form. The shrinking concept as well as the interactive music approach were subsequently dropped. The prototype was completed within about six months, in time for the year's Japan Media Arts Festival for exhibition. Takahashi also presented the game for an internal review, leading Namco to green light the game's full development.