“First it’s a butterfly you’re after. Then a pencil.” Then, in Edge’s list, “a penguin, a tricycle, a pachinko machine”. The magazine’s review of Katamari Damacy in 2004 opened with a list, because the game is a list. The player is a tiny prince pushing a sticky ball, the katamari, and anything smaller than the ball that it touches sticks to it. The ball grows, and bigger things start to stick: “tractors and phone booths, baseball teams and elephants. Windmills, oil rigs, brontosauruses. It’s never, ever enough.” It was the first game by Keita Takahashi, a sculptor by training who had been at Namco for two years without finishing a game, and it became the game Western developers held up as a blueprint for what the industry could be doing.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Namco, in Japan; Namco Hometek in America.
- Designer: Keita Takahashi.
- Platform: PlayStation 2.
- Released: Japan, March 2004, at ¥4,500; America, later in 2004, at a list price of $19.99. There was no European release.
- Players: one, with a two-player battle mode.
- Sequels: We Love Katamari (2005) and others; the remaster Katamari Damacy Reroll (2018) for Switch and PC.
The King’s mistake
The story is told in cartoon cutscenes. The King of All Cosmos, the prince’s father, has knocked the stars out of the sky during what Wireframe called “an intergalactic bender”. The prince is sent to Earth to roll up katamaris big enough to replace them. Each stage gives him a target size and a time limit; at the end the King turns the ball into a star and passes judgement on it. Reviewing the sequel, Edge noted that the King’s “violent disappointment is hard to bear when you fail a level”.
Rolling
The controls use both analogue sticks “rather in the manner of tank tracks”, as Edge put it: both forward to roll forward, both back to retreat, and angled against each other to steer. “It takes a little getting used to, but the sense of balance and inertia the system provides makes the game as wonderfully tactile as its premise suggests.”
What sticks depends on weight as well as size. Edge found that “iron statues remain unattached even when you dwarf them, but even a moderate ball can pick up huge slices of fencing”. The shape of the ball matters too. Sticking a couple of lamp posts on early “turns you into something more like a stilt walker, lurching forward in uneven tumbles”, which makes the ball harder to steer but can lift it onto higher ground. Hitting something too big knocks objects off and shrinks the ball. The levels are built as mazes whose doors and passages open up and then close again as the ball grows “first big enough and then too big to fit through”. Along the way the tone changes from “initial tranquillity to a delicious rampage”: policemen shoot at the ball, and joggers are rolled up “with squeals of horror or, just possibly, delight”.
The first stages start in a house and a school, among drawing pins and playing cards. By the end of the game, as Fusion described it in 2026, “you’re rolling up skyscrapers and islands”.
The sound
Edge singled out the soundtrack, “not just the infectious songs, but the spot sound effects for each object, which rise to a caterwauling cacophony as your ball grows”. Wireframe, reviewing Reroll, counted J-pop, “funky electronica”, mambo, samba, jazz “and even English vocals” in it, all opening with the “na na na” of the theme song.
Takahashi’s game
Takahashi described how it began in a talk at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. He had studied sculpture, and joined Namco because “the videogame industry sold pleasure”. “I’d been at Namco for two years and it did not look good that I hadn’t participated in a game which had been completed,” he said. “It was a personal crisis.” He drew up a list of what he thought every game should be: “new, easily understood, enjoyable and funny”. Fusion’s retrospective adds two sources for the idea: tamakorogashi, a school sports-day game in which a team rolls a giant ball towards a goal, and an unreleased demonstration at Sony. It also reports that Namco filled the levels with objects made by students at its Digital Hollywood Game Laboratory, each held to a polygon budget so that the PlayStation 2 could show a great many at once.
Edge previewed the game in October 2003 as “Katamari Damashi”, calling it “one of the more interesting announcements” at Sony’s PlayStation Meeting that year, though early word suggested a game driven by its concept. Its review in May 2004 gave it eight out of ten.
How the West found it
According to Edge, many visitors to the Tokyo Game Show in 2003 dismissed the demonstration disc as a novelty “which no one would play for more than ten minutes”. Then, a fortnight after the game came out in Japan, Takahashi showed it at the Game Developers Conference’s experimental game workshop, and word spread among developers. Namco, which “hadn’t expected the warmth of the western reception”, arranged an American release. Takahashi was amazed that it kept its Japanese name. Namco Hometek sold it in America for $19.99, a budget price, as one Edge reader pointed out.
By 2005, Edge wrote, there seemed to be “only two games on the western developer playlist: World Of WarCraft and Katamari Damacy”. At that year’s Game Developers Conference Takahashi’s talk earned a standing ovation, and Edge called the game “a handy shorthand, a blueprint for everything many people wish the videogame industry was doing and fear it never will again”. Europe never got the original. In March 2005 a reader asked Edge, “will we ever get to play it in Europe?”; Europe got the sequel instead, in 2006.
Sequels and after
“Namco may not have known that a project so small could build up a following so large,” Edge wrote in 2005, “but it’s certainly willing to put that momentum to the test.” Takahashi was opposed to a sequel, but one came anyway; Fusion says Electronic Arts had already signed up to distribute it. We Love Katamari (Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy in Japan) followed in July 2005, built on the idea that fans of the first game now want the prince to roll things up for them. Edge’s review called it “the Katamari remix album, bringing freshness to the old standards”, and observed that the original had “found itself in [a] peculiar and highly estimable position of near unanimous and unassailable praise”. A third game, Boku no Watashi no Katamari Damacy, came to the PSP, and Beautiful Katamari to the Xbox 360 in 2007. Fusion notes that the series carried on without Takahashi. He left Namco Bandai in 2010 after more than a decade, saying that he had “only made four games in 11 years”. His last game there was Noby Noby Boy; later came Wattam.
In December 2018 Bandai Namco released Katamari Damacy Reroll, a remaster for the Nintendo Switch and PC that also offered simpler one-stick controls. Wireframe gave it 84%, noting that, after appearing only in Japan and America, “this is effectively the first time Keita Takahashi’s cult debut has been rolled out worldwide”. In 2021 the same magazine recommended the original as “an arcade action game that’s as straightforwardly addictive and ingenious as anything developer/publisher Namco put out in its eighties heyday”.
Sources
- Edge issue 128, October 2003, p. 42: preview of “Katamari Damashi” (spring 2004 in Japan; PlayStation Meeting 2003).
- Edge issue 136, May 2004, p. 104: review (¥4,500; the list of objects; tank-track controls; weight and size; lamp posts; mazes; policemen and joggers; the soundtrack; two-player mode; eight out of ten).
- PC Magazine (US) volume 23 issue 22, 14 December 2004, p. 69: Katamari Damacy, “For PS2. $19.99 list. Namco Hometek Inc.”
- Edge issue 147, March 2005, p. 101: reader’s letter (“in the US it’s a budget title”; “will we ever get to play it in Europe?”).
- Edge issue 149, May 2005, pp. 59–60: report of Takahashi’s GDC 2005 talk, “Rolling The Dice: The Risks And Rewards Of Developing Katamari Damacy” (sculpture; two years at Namco; the list; the Japanese name; the standing ovation; “a handy shorthand”).
- Edge issue 150, June 2005, p. 33: Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy preview (release 7 July in Japan; “a project so small”).
- Edge issue 153, September 2005, pp. 85 and 88–89: Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy review (the King’s upbringing and “violent disappointment”; “the Katamari remix album”; “near unanimous and unassailable praise”).
- Edge issue 158, January 2006, pp. 48–51: “Everybody Loves Takahashi” (the Tokyo Game Show demo disc; GDC’s experimental gameplay workshop; Namco and the US release; the developer playlist; Takahashi on sequels).
- Edge issue 161, April 2006, p. 3: We Love Katamari on PAL PlayStation 2s.
- Edge issue 220, November 2010, p. 13: Takahashi leaves Namco Bandai (“only made four games in 11 years”; We Love Katamari’s PAL release in 2006; Noby Noby Boy).
- Wireframe issue 2, November 2018, p. 16: Katamari Damacy Reroll due on 7 December 2018 for PC and Switch.
- Wireframe issue 4, December 2018, pp. 59–60: Katamari Damacy Reroll review (Bandai Namco, £15.99; the “intergalactic bender”; simplified controls; the soundtrack; only released in Japan and the US before; 84%).
- Wireframe issue 50, April 2021, pp. 108–109: Ryan Lambie on Wattam, recommending Katamari Damacy.
- Andrew Fisher, “Why We Still Katamari”, Fusion Annual 2026, pp. 48–51: the controls; houses, schools, drawing pins, skyscrapers and islands; the King’s binge; the soundtrack; Takahashi’s training; tamakorogashi and the Sony demonstration; the Digital Hollywood Game Laboratory; We Love Katamari and Electronic Arts; Beautiful Katamari (2007); the series without Takahashi.