Katamari Damacy | Why I Love
Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by Sigtrap co-founders Gary Lloyd and Luke Thompson, who launched the Time Crisis-inspired Under Cover on Meta Quest earlier this month.
Katamari Damacy was one of my favorite games long before I ever became a game developer. But now I love it even more.
So picture this: the year is 2004. The PlayStation 2 and Xbox are in the middle of their lifetime cycle. Games and graphics have been improving drastically over the last years, becoming more complex, more realistic, more immersive. Studios are keen on taking advantage of these advancing technologies and showcasing the best they can do with them.
And what a year it was! Doom 3, Fable, Far Cry, GTA: San Andreas, Halo 2, World of Warcraft, The Chronicles of Riddick, and that all-time classic, Half-Life 2, among many, many other memorable and groundbreaking titles.
And then there's this group of developers in Japan working for the famous company Namco with this idea for a really fun game called Katamari Damacy. No, it's not going to be groundbreaking. No, it's not going to take advantage of the latest advances in graphics technology. Apparently, the game designer Keita Takahashi had some difficulties pitching the game to Namco's superiors, and… well, I'm not surprised!
As a game developer, and studio co-founder, I know all too well how these meetings can go, and how profit-oriented these superiors/managers/shareholders can be at times. I can almost imagine in my head what this conversation must have sounded like:
Businessman: "Lots of impressive and ambitious games coming out soon. So what is this game about?"
Developer: "Uhhmm… Well, you are a small character, you control a small ball and you push it and roll it around various environments."
Businessman: "I see… so then what happens?"
Developer: "Well, you roll the ball, it gets bigger, and when you
