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Inside the Mind of Keita Takahashi
Most game developers get into the industry to make money while having fun. Ask Katamari's creator, Keita Takahashi, and he'd tell you that he wanted to get people to play games so that they'd stop fighting wars.
Takahashi didn't really want to be a game designer from the start. He majored in sculpting arts, and he decided that his creative talent could be best put to use in a way that lets people have the most fun. Shortly after graduating, he got a job at Namco and was surprised to find that he didn't care for most of the game concepts. He pitched the idea for Katamari Damacy, and it was flatly rejected. He kept working with the idea anyways, and eventually assembled his own team from within Namco to get it started. The rest is history. Katamari Damacy became the cult-hit of 2004 almost overnight, and Takahashi is now hailed as a genius game developer. Now that his first game performed miles beyond anyone's expectations, Takahashi had an open door to do whatever he wanted with the sequel.
There's a funny thing, though, about Takahashi's philosophy of the gaming industry. He doesn't like sequels. In an interview with 1UP, he said "In trying to put Katamari Damacy together, I saw that there were so many games out there nowadays that looked the same. And on top of that, there are so many sequels. Even though these are 'games,' I didn't really feel there was anything exciting or fun about them at all." It was only after he realized that a sequel could be an opportunity for fan-service that he agreed to help out with We &hearts Katamari. Conversely, he wasn't involved with the PSP game, nor will he be working on future installments of the series.
So where is Takahashi now? Still at Namco for the time being, and he's working on a completely new project for next-gen consoles. Takahashi won't be there forever, though - in an interview with BBC, he explained that he already wants to move on from designing games. His true ambition? Playgrounds. Such an odd choice of career change shouldn't be too much of a surprise from the creator of such an odd series, but his many fans among both gamers and developers will miss his work. Takahashi has set the creative bar for a game designer in the 21st century, and it won't be easy to match.
Interested to learn more about the man behind the ball? Check out these interviews we used to put this page together:
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