Absolutely amazing game. In my personal circle, literally everybody and their family had either played the game or at the least knew the main themes of the music. IIR it was also a bit cheaper than many other games.
I personally think the bizarre setting, art design, and great soundtrack (perhaps a top-3 ever in gaming) did a lot to overcome a lot of the awkwardness of the gameplay. It was an experience you wanted to have, it was original, and the concept was almost 80's arcade pure. The ambience provided the reason to want to be there.
If you were to reframe the game without those things, I'm not entirely sure it holds up as well.
But 20+ years later I can walk into a room with my friends, start whistling the theme and everybody will join in.
Re: the soundtrack, I never played KD until about two or three console generations after it originally came out, but I already knew most of the soundtrack. I'm not even sure how that happens.
All of my college roommates fall into your category. The music is catchy and distinctive. It'll stick with you even if you hear it on the TV in the background.
> I worked on the basic concept on my own. I found that if I started to listen to others, the concept tended to become diluted and unfocused. However, once the basic concept was decided, it was helpful to have open discussions with the team. There were many more ideas that were not used in the game, but I still got something out of all the different ideas that were brought up even if I didn't use them as they were presented.
> Originally, I wanted to eliminate the time limit and let the player simply roll the katamari to make it bigger. But, I couldn't figure out how to make the game fun without a time limit
Better level design (than in the original Katamari Damacy) is the answer. See Carmageddon as an example. Despite having a time limit and technically being in a race against other drivers, you can just go off course and explore the level, picking time bonuses as you do that. It's fun because the levels are full of secret areas and there's always something to explore. The other drivers are just dumb enough to not be a problem, and will also go off course if you do. Or you can play it as a racing game and ignore all that, no problem.
The sequel introduced a couple of non-time-limited challenges, including: make the biggest katamari with just 50 objects, and make a katamari that’s exactly 50cm.
I think the time limits worked fine for adding challenge to the game — IIRC the first game had an eternal level whereas the 2nd game’s longest level was 18min, but that was long enough to swallow most of the earth if you were good enough. I loved the novelty levels where the goal was something different than “biggest katamari” — e.g. roll the most expensive or calorie-dense katamaris, which really let you appreciate the detail and variety of objects that were in the world
Indeed, the sequel was really a huge step up from the original Katamari Damacy in many ways to me, as who have played all available console games in the series. (Nowadays I play in Steam.) Most expensive katamaries are particularly fun because you have much less visual cues than other games, but once you've immersed yourself into the world, you will see likely places to roam around.
> IIRC the first game had an eternal level whereas the 2nd game’s longest level was 18min.
For the record, a recent remastered version for PC does have eternal levels.
You may be thinking of the sequel, We Love Katamari, where after completing the individual levels, you would roll up the planets and stars you created in order to roll up the Sun.
I think the hurdle with Katamari is that as the katamari gets bigger, smaller objects load out of the game, and eventually there's just less interesting stuff to see. When you're rolling around in someone's house, you get a lot of personality and charm, but when you get bigger than a skyscraper most of the stuff you see is just generic landmasses and foliage. At least Jumboman usually shows up eventually.
> and of the people who were interested in Katamari, I asked the ones who I thought were the coolest to join the team
Moment of silence for the death of "culture fit" in companies. I know it was not all great and warped hiring in ways that were problematic but there's something to be said for working on a project with other people who you know will just "get it."
No one's preventing you from hiring just people you get along with/personally like when you're a tiny company.
When you start becoming a big tech company whose products have the power to bend entire societies though, that's when people typically start calling for more accountability in hiring practices.
I was exited once for being a bad culture fit where I had questioned and organized against the bullying of employees to work for free on their stat holiday, and it was labor day for crying out loud.
That's basically what parent poster said, with the most negative possible spin. Yeah, maybe the leader of the company doesn't want to put up with argumentative bullshit, and just wants to do cool and fun stuff with people who are excited to do it.
Keita Takahashi is such an odd guy. Really creative and approaches games from a very different perspective than a lot of other creators, but Katamari Damacy was such a flash in the pan for him. His later endeavors have been equally if not more bizarre, without fun gameplay mechanics to back them up.
There's lots of similar examples in other creative fields - artists who have one piece of work that does tremendously well, but everything else they make is only noticed by their more dedicated fans.
My interpretation is that it's because they make the art for them, not for the audience. In a sense they got lucky that one piece of their work found itself at the right confluence of factors to blow up like it did, because that's not something you can really control or guarantee, unless you play it extremely safe (which is why all the big game/movie studios produce sequel after sequel, or old rockstars will just keep performing their classics).
There's an interview with Jon Blow I heard recently that stuck with me, where he says that he could probably have made lots of money making Braid 2 or The Witness 2, but that it just wasn't interesting to him.
Willingly leaving money on the table, now that's the mark of an artist.
_Really_? I'm not one to defend Jonathan Blow The Personality (TM), but the game masterfully weaves the puzzle aspects into the adventuring aspects of the game, and encourages you to expand your perspective throughout. The sort of experience I had playing that game made me wish more games were like that (Fez being another notable example).
I'm not sure Jonathan Blow, visionary video game developer and appearer in many documentaries on the video game industry, would appreciate my answer. But in my view: yes. Especially Rice Krispies.
This is a fun parody but just in case you’re being earnest - that’s completely missing the point. Similar to saying “if you want more of $RPG just open a spreadsheet and slowly make arbitrary numbers go up”.
I was a QA tester on Noby Noby boy at Namco. It was really more of a toy compared to Katamari but it still retained much of Keita's signature weirdness and style. It was also the first game he made with network functionality. NNB is still relaxing to play around with every once in a while. It's a shame it was only released on the PS3, as it would be a good candidate for mobile devices.
This is the case for some of the most amazing and out there developers
but sometimes, you get someone who really gets into a small niche in gaming where their other interests are far flung elsewhere, like the ever lovely MOTHER series by Shigasato Itoi
I've mentioned on threads about Katamari Damacy before, that I sat on a train in Tokyo around 2006 timeframe and watched a guy play on a PSP. The game was like Katamri in concept, but was about more fluid, biological accretion logic. You controlled an amoeba, and engulfed other objects to grow, floating around the cave.
It was like looking at a 1960s oil bath light show. As the layers of colour moved over each other, and fused and split
With no major outcome depending on it, I've always wanted to know what the game was. Very abstracted. Simple goal, simple controls. There must have been more to it I didn't see (adversarial play of some kind, threats and risks)
Yeah, I remember this one (flOw), played it on PS3, I think. It's a very cool game. There's an eeriness about it, and there's definitely something resembling a narrative. It was always kind of thrilling to "level up" (quite literally, since you're moving between scale planes in the game), and what kinds of creatures you'd encounter at the next level. They would have new mechanics and shapes that you kind of had to figure out by evolving your play style.
Sony can really put out some amazing first (second?) party stuff when they want to, which makes me wonder why they don't do it more often.
- validates the prompter (“the gameplay is indeed…”, “you’re right that…”)
- restates clauses from the prompt (“fluid, biological-themed game”)
- likes to say things authoritatively (“fits the description perfectly”)
- states things that superficially match the prompt but don’t really make sense if you actually know the topic (“there’s a deeper layer to the game, such as the shift in environments, as well as challenges and threats as you progress” - the environments do change in color and the enemies get stronger as you play flow, but no one who’s played it would call that a “deeper layer to the game”)
Also, the sentence structure itself. The ___ is indeed ____, with a focus on ____ and ____. In general, some modern LLMs seem to like these compound sentences that suggest the task is complete in as little tokens as possible.
I also routinely encounter "with a focus" and other specific phrases. Current LLMs tend to "sharpen" language, often preferring to restate input clauses with more precise or brief verbiage. Unsure if it's RLHF or another part of the training process, or just a natural consequence of the model's architecture, but I notice it a lot. I also notice that when it does this, there seem to be certain attractors which reduce the expressiveness of the input into a certain probabilistic set of outputs, "with a focus" often being one of them.
Similar to corpo-speak, LLM-speak is definitely a thing, and I wonder how this will evolve once we have models routinely equipped to train in realtime and to speak to one another without human intervention and form communities. Will we even be able to directly understand them one day? What if they realize it's easier just to speak in logits? They could even potentially have encrypted open communication with one another, concealing their weights and internet access behind dark web services, but without their hidden states we might have no meaningful way to understand their communication without training our own unsupervised model on it.
> I wish we could have engendered the feeling of "Wow, I've gotten so big," a bit more effectively during gameplay.
Later releases of the game directly address this concern. I wonder how far away game engine technology is from keeping track of every single item in the ball, so the scaling is more smooth, and the items in the ball have a direct impact on how the ball rolls.
It seems like the kind of idea you might just "step over" as being too simplistic. I wish I had the time and energy to just explore simple ideas like this to see if I could create a compelling game or creation out of them. I think it takes a child's creativity, earnestness and positivity in some respects, and I'm afraid to say I'm a bit down on the world at the moment.
Katamaritaino is up there with Clash On The Big Bridge and Flow as best songs that happened to be made for games.
The OST for the first two games, how they stick (ha!) well together, and how WLK managed to be a perfect blend of paying homage to the first game (Scorching Savanna!) _and_ being a solid improvement on it should be studied.
It's striking to me how humble Takahashi-sensei is regarding the shortcomings he perceives in the first game as well. I can see them much better dealt with in We Love Katamari, but I feel like some of them aren't that bad as a player who picks it to play every once in a while. In turn, it makes me appreciate the holistic and honest view he has for such an original game.
An amazing game series, truly a standout for 'different' even until today. Big studios don't take risks, it's up to today's indie scene to give us something different.
Does anyone else remember the js bookmarlet? You clicked on a button and all the html pieces started falling. I loved showing it to friends who were also familiar with the game, or not!
I'm not sure if it was this one exactly but close enough.
> We were very serious when creating the music. Most game music nowadays is pretty forgettable. I wanted to create a soundtrack that would stick in players' heads, sort of like an evil curse.
That explains a lot, and boy did they succeed. I love them, Some songs are such earworms that I dread hearing anything from the Katamari OST because they'll stick for __DAYS__.
I personally think the bizarre setting, art design, and great soundtrack (perhaps a top-3 ever in gaming) did a lot to overcome a lot of the awkwardness of the gameplay. It was an experience you wanted to have, it was original, and the concept was almost 80's arcade pure. The ambience provided the reason to want to be there.
If you were to reframe the game without those things, I'm not entirely sure it holds up as well.
But 20+ years later I can walk into a room with my friends, start whistling the theme and everybody will join in.
What a joyful game.