Katamari Damacy - Development

Development

Toru Iwatani, head of research and development for Namco, stated that the idea for Katamari Damacy resulted from Keita Takahashi's school project from the Namco Digital Hollywood Game Laboratory, a sponsored institute for game development education. Keita Takahashi's final thesis bore out the core gameplay ideas, while a team of ten (including the student) developed the final product. The game was developed for less than US$1 million, a tenth of the cost of Namco blockbuster titles such as Ridge Racer or Soulcalibur. The game took a year and a half to develop, with eight months of prototyping.

Lead developer Keita Takahashi said that the team was aiming for four key points in developing the game: novelty, ease of understanding, enjoyment, and humor. Iwatani compared the game to Namco's Pac-Man, which focused on simplicity and innovation, and served as a template for future games from the company. At one point during development, Takahashi "proactively ignored" advice from Namco to increase the complexity of the game.

The core gameplay of Katamari Damacy is the subject of U.S. Patent 7,402,104, "Game performing method, game apparatus, storage medium, data signal and program". The patent, issued in 2009, primarily describes how the game maintains the roughly spherical nature of the katamari when objects are picked up, though extends to concepts such as tracking objects collected based on temperature or weight values, which were modes included with later games of the series.