The surreal, colourful Katamari Damacy is 20 – and still the weirdest game I have ever loved
My parents were somewhat sceptical of video games when I was growing up. I did have a SNES and then an N64 as a child, but I was allowed to play them only at weekends, so on Fridays I would come home from school and binge on Mario 64 with a huge pack of Haribo Tangfastics. My gaming horizons didn’t broaden until I was a teenager, when I started earning enough of my own money to buy myself a PlayStation 2 and I started hanging out on forums with other nerds whose gaming worlds were significantly broader than mine.
And the PlayStation 2 had some weird games. The N64 did to an extent – I nurture an enduring fondness for Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon – but not like Sony’s console. There was Dark Cloud and Monster Hunter, Yakuza and Mojib-Ribbon, God Hand and Ōkami and Ribbit King, which is still, as far as I know, the only game about frolf (frog golf).
Then there was Katamari Damacy, the very emblem of all that was weird and wonderful about the PlayStation 2 library, a joyous game that turns 20 this week.
The premise is this: the eccentric king of the universe, who wears a pair of purple tights of Shakespearean clinginess, has smashed the cosmos up after one too many beers, and you, his tiny green prince, must take a sticky ball to Earth and roll it around, collecting ever-larger objects until your clump of stuff is big enough to replace the moon and planets. It has a strong contender for the best theme tune of any video game in history, alongside one of the best intro sequences, too. Behold.
The thing is, you are only 5cm tall. “That body, that physique. Could you really be our son?” exclaims the king. So you have to start out small – like, really small, rolling up thumb tacks and dice and empty soy sauce packets. Animals chase you around trying to knock your katamari ball off course, and if you slam into things that are too huge to roll up, you’ll scatter your precious trash. Katamari Damacy is surreal and hilarious and very, very fun, as you progress towards rolling up cows and cars and people and, eventually, buildings and islands and clouds. It only lasts about four hours and it leaves a lifelong impression on everyone who plays it, if only because you simply cannot get the music out of your head. Twenty years later and it still sometimes arrives in my head while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil.
Katamari Damacy is emblematic of this era of Japanese game development – PS2 technology was just good enough for game designers’ more ambitious ideas to begin to flourish, and budgets were not yet so prohibitive as to require multimillion sales. The result was a bunch of short, surreal, often rather broken games that existed only because someone really wanted them to; you can see their designers’ minds reflected in them so clearly. A lot of these games never made it to the rest of the world. Katamari Damacy itself was never officially released in Europe – but happily for curious teenagers in the 00s, importing games was relatively easy if you knew your way around the internet, and the PS2’s region lock was mercifully simple to circumvent. In 2004, getting a hold of a copy and getting it to work felt like unearthing an artistic treasure.
Katamari’s designer, Keita Takahashi, made it in less than a year with a budget of £650,000, enlisting students from publisher Namco’s design school and programmers from its arcade division. Takahashi studied sculpture at art school and made several other interesting games after this, though it’s fair to say that none was as fun. Namco went on making the series without him for years after he left the company in 2009, but it was never quite the same: more recent Katamari games felt like self-parodies. Katamari Damacy is so beloved precisely because nobody had really seen anything like it before.
No doubt this is mostly because I’m not a teenager any more, but I so rarely get that feeling now – like I’m playing something I’ve never really seen before. If you’re lucky enough not to have experienced it already, there’s a good remaster of Katamari Damacy called Katamari Damacy Reroll on Steam and all the consoles. Happy 20th birthday, you beautiful weirdo.
What to play
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is out on Friday and I have been having the time of my life with it. I’ve been waiting 12 years for a sequel to the strangest medieval RPG I’ve ever played and it does not disappoint – it’s like Elden Ring meets The Witcher, but comfortingly ridiculous, in that you can pick people up and carry them around for no reason, or find yourself battling an ogre in the middle of a populous city with nobody batting an eyelid.
It’s the opposite of the tightly scripted RPGs that now dominate the genre, instead throwing a bunch of fun systems together and letting you experiment with how they collide, so unexpected things happen all the time. As I type this, I am in the middle of an adventure in a haunted castle with a mage who looks like Aladdin Sane-era David Bowie and a greatsword-wielding warrior servant straight out of Dark Souls.
Available on: PS5, Xbox Series X, PC
Estimated playtime: 50+ hours
What to read
Bloomberg claims that Sony is pausing production of the PSVR2 virtual reality headset, as many thousands of units remain unsold. Sony has never felt totally behind this expensive indulgence of an accessory – it has released just a couple of games for it since its launch last year – and it seems like the consumer demand just isn’t there either. Hate to say I told you so.
Mutsumi Inomata, the character designer and artist whose work defined the look of Namco Bandai’s Tales series of role-playing games, has died, aged 63.
EA’s studios are the latest to be hit by layoffs, as the mega-publisher cuts 5% of its global workforce. Apex Legends developer Respawn is worst hit.
What to click
Alone in the Dark review – Jodie Comer and David Harbour can’t save this soporific horror
‘A portal to a new world’: when the Trocadero was the centre of the video game universe
Summerhouse – this dreamy pixel renovation game is the ideal escape
Question Block
A question this week from reader Danny:
“Which Pokémon game for Nintendo Switch would you recommend for introducing my nine- and six-year-old daughters to the series?”
Happily for you, Danny, I just introduced my children, who are a similar age, to Pokémon this year and they’re now fully obsessed. They’re getting so much joy out of these games, it truly delights me. You’ve got two good options here. The first is Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee!, a remake of the OG Red/Blue Pokémon games, which blends Pokémon Go-style catching into the old-school battling and collecting – making it easier for kids to catch critters by mock-throwing a Pokéball at the screen. (Also, if you played the originals, your children will think you are omniscient.)
The other option is Pokémon Sword and Shield, which I’ve just finished with my kids. It’s easy, cartoonishly beautiful, easy to read, and comes with all the gaming mod cons that the original generation of Pokémon trainers had to do without (such as actually telling you which moves are and aren’t going to be effective on your opponent, right there on the battle screen).
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
