He created the Katamari games, but they’re rolling on without him | Hacker News Reader

He created the Katamari games, but they’re rolling on without him

nytimes.com

126 pointsPaulHoule67 comments

Keita Takahashi famously never even wanted to make another Katamari game after the first ones. Namco had so little faith in the project they dumped it out as a budget release at the time, thinking it would get swept up in the PS2's shovelware oceans

I cannot imagine how crushing that must've been as a creator, though thankfully his game did achieve quite the cult following (and even an eventual Unity re-release on Steam and other platforms)

Namco at the time was so surprised by the success of it they immediately requested more Katamari to which he largely declined. Though the later games are still pretty enjoyable

Really, was it really seen as shovelware by the publisher? It was heavily promoted on PS2 booths here in Switzerland back when it came out. Katamari and EyeToy were promoted alongside each other as quirky 2000s era aesthetic titles.

Somehow I feel like the aesthetics of Satoshi Kon were of the same time and same sensibility. I would also add Studio 4°C to it. Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game. Genius Party. In my mind all these Japan things from that era blend together.

Kingdom Hearts was also of the same era, and also promoted the same way, but I never played that.

In Europe we didn't get access to Katamari until the second game, so yes, by then it was comparatively big news and "We Love Katamari" was promoted because Katamari Damacy had done so well in other markets.

Ah, thanks for the information! You are right.

Doesn't Japan tend to get releases from Japanese publishers before the West gets it?

From what I recall and can find online, the original game was only released in Japan and North America.

I'm pretty sure this is true. Here in the UK I had to import the US version (should have imported the Japanese version) and region hack the console to play it using one of those slide devices that let you open the CD tray after the game had started.

What was his basis for rejection? I'd like to imagine he considered the work complete at that point and was rejecting milking the life out of the characters and world.

In the unending wash of remakes and unnecessary decade+-later sequels today I sometimes wonder if original creators were facing some monetary hardship and gave in.

Or they just don't own the IP and the company gets other people to make them?

> they dumped it out as a budget release at the time

I remember buying Katamari Damacy and Gradius V on the same launch day for C$20 each. Incredible value for two insanely great games. Just wild in retrospect.

This is the gist of it - at this point he could have requested royalties and probably would have gotten them. Otherwise he was a salaried designer for a title whose success was improbable.

I guess everyone could ask for a "if an idea of mine hits $10M of sales get 0.5%" clause in their contracts with a low risk to the employer, but then it's virtually guaranteed that he was one of dozens whose ideas went into this, 20x0.5% is a lot.

It’s not really low risk to the employer - with all the employees and projects it’s guaranteed to hit and the company has to pay out.

Of course, recognizing unexpected success just is what profit sharing is designed to do.

Well, an individual project doing well doesn't mean the company made a profit.

As usual, huge profits are made by taking on risk. These publishers are ok to lose money on a bunch of things because it will be paid back on the random unpredictable wins. If everyone requested some term of "if it's successful, I want the profits", then your risk free salary would be reduced.

When there's extremely abundant capital available the opportunity for the business owners to take that kind of risk is valuable and the creative artist responsible for fulfilling that opportunity deserves a fair equitable share of the revenue that results.

When there's abundant capital available then there's still a price for that capital.

But that's just "there's money; I should have some", which is understandable, but doesn't have a good enough grounding in reality. More fundamentally: there is a market for talent. If no other artists are willing to work without this benefit then one of two things will happen. Either this benefit will be added to artists' contracts, or the projects won't happen in the first place because they will never make enough money to be worth the investment.

Namco didn't have abundant capital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namco#Financial_decline_and_re...

And they are completely free to add whatever terms they want to their employment contract, or to go solo and take all of the risk and all of the profit. What more would you want?

The creator of Fruit Ninja released a fantastic video about the origins of the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St5v2uI-Nis

I highly recommend it, it's a fantastic post mortem (they shipped the original game, from prototype to 1.0, in just 6 weeks!)

Similarly, he was just an employee at the game studio, and never made significant money from it (which he mentions led to confusion when seeking funding as he started his own company later - people kept asking "why don't you just use your Fruit Ninja money?").

Big fan of Keita, played all of his games (including the weird ps3/iphone nobynobyboy/girl), had the pleasure of meeting him in SF when he was working on Wattam, writing this from a laptop with a katamari sticker on it. One of my favorite designers.

I had also been wondering why he started making YouTube videos, appreciate the insight. His videos are excellent and though I didn't really care for Fruit Ninja, it was definitely part of an era of mobile games that really utilized the new format well and I can appreciate the intuition to make the mechanic.

Chopping things up specifically where the chopping instrument hit an entity was one of those features that felt unlikely until the distant future, especially for 3D. Kind of like full building destruction until games like Red Faction and Battlefield came along. Then when it did show up (Metal Gear Rising was where I first saw it) I really didn't want it, at least not for people. It was too much for me to watch people get diced up specifically where you diced them.

Now for a game like Viewfinder, holy smokes, what a fantastic era of gaming we live in that we can bisect objects in real time so seamlessly.

also Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Great example, such a cool game. They did a great job of gamifying the mechanic with progression and story too

The soundtrack was so eclectic and spacey. Checkout the soundtrack, especially lonely rolling star. it was one of my favorites.

Lonely Rolling Star https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7_QydNXI_ok

The Moon & The Prince https://youtu.be/pUJeiEva0Hw

soundtrack is oddly not on Spotify.

I listen to a frightening amount of video game music and the Katamari and Etrian Odyssey series are the ones with the most consistently stellar music out there. Katamari is especially good because of how, like you mentioned, eclectic it is. The sequels endlessly remix the original songs and add new ones and you end up with a collection of music that ranges from jazz, to rock, to house, to latin music, pop and everything in between. It astounds me how good it is. I have all of it on my dropbox and come back to year after year after year.

You really can’t go with a bad recommendation (OP’s is excellent) but my one (at least today) would be: Katamari On The Funk https://youtu.be/9EQnzIT5STM?si=Okj0Wub6JVUNafWi

The soundtracks and the aesthetics of the first two games had a huge impact on me as an early teenager.

I think I had only really seen video games presented in one or two ways, and something so colourful and left-field really shook my expectations open.

I first heard The Postal Service on a stereo in a department store in Portland, Oregon. The song was "Brand New Colony": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-9GuBV9Mp7A

I honestly thought it was Katamari music when I heard it.

I do believe that Katamari may have changed the American music scene.

Just stumbled on this wonderful Easter Egg:

https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Love+Katamari

Click the bouncing ball to get started.

See also: <http://kathack.com/>

How the Japanese companies operate can be pretty strange from a non-Japanese perspective. I've read that Toru Iwatani, also from Namco, who designed Pac-Man, was not compensated in any way financially for the success of the game. He seems to have integrated better in the company's structure than Takahashi, but that may have been thanks to other skills besides game design.

This is true in games companies in the west too. Personally I was not even allowed to be credited, and thanks to NDAs with other involved parties I cannot discuss the nature of the work either. This has the fun side effect that many of the things I actually did do sound like absolute nonsense and are externally unverifiable - not a recipe for a happy situation.

But I actually did fairly well. I know excellent devs that were making <$50k/year leading teams delivering hundreds of millions in revenue annually, and they maybe got another 10 days of vacation.

That sounds like a far from ideal situation. Credits should be mandatory IMO, since everyone appreciates them and they cost the company nothing. I'm fortunate to have had a better experience with that during my time in the games industry.

However, let's say that you come up with a game idea, design the game all they way until it ships and then it does gangbusters well, making the company millions and millions. Getting some serious appreciation doesn't seem far fetched in that case, like CliffyB and such got, to give an example. But if not that, at least some generous bonuses and promotions would be expected in an Euro-American company.

Apparently not for these 2 guys. That's what I was referring to.

Work for hire is very much a thing in the west. One of the things that drew creators to Image Comics was their policy of letting creators keep the rights to their creations -- something highly unusual in the industry at the time (and today), and certainly not practiced by Marvel or DC.

That sounds more like the movie industry approach.

In the games industry, that would probably only happen in you developed the entire game yourself and only needed a publisher. If you need to take payment in advance for development, you would also most likely lose the IP.

Both Takahashi and Iwatani were Namco employees, so they wouldn't get to keep any IP they developed within the company. But that doesn't stop the said company from giving them bonuses and promotions. Doesn't seem to have happened in their case.

I think of the how the people behind the Fate franchise on the other hand held on to all the rights as they bootstrapped, first starting with an almost no budget visual novel that was a smash hit, then into games of increasing complexity and then a mobile game which makes obscene amounts of money. In their case there was always the suggestion that it all came from a world bigger than what they could show you in the game and it was also settings-and-character driven, the gameplay was almost besides the point.

> the gameplay was almost besides the point.

Well yes, because it was porn.

no one flippantly calls game of thrones or rated r movies porn even though many of them have a far larger ratio of sex and nudity to non-sex sex and nudity scenes than you will find in fate/stay night.

fate stay night is a 90 hour visual novel with a few short sex scenes that are effectively bolted on after the fact and are even cut out entirely of most releases of the game at this point.

Oh please, spare me the indignation.

I remember just fine when the translations for Tsukihime and FSN were released. I remember fine when Fate/Hollow Ataraxia was released. Nobody was deluding themselves

Everyone knew just fine this was porn with pretty decent story attached to it. Rance and MGQ had good enough gameplay attached to it, but everyone knows its for porn.

I remember when Mahoutsukai no Yoru was released and everyone begging to figure out where the porn was. Last time i checked, a TL still hasn't been released a decade later, no porn as a reward.

Yes, the game has been edited to be family friendly and vanilla at this point, but it doesn't change the fact that it was originally released as hentai, Nasu's ability to compare genitals to oysters be damned.

A great many of today's fans have never encountered the sex scenes. They're a tiny fraction of the original game, they're well-known as not being particularly erotic or well-written; they're really not important or relevant to the game's history or sales. A couple of sex scenes don't make a game "porn" any more than a couple of quips make a game "comedy". That you focus on them says more about you than it does about FSN.

One out of Clannad and Kanon has sex scenes in and the other doesn't. I can't even remember which is which, and it doesn't matter.

You're both sharing the same point.

Sex sells, and is an important part of boosting attention to a product. Yet the game and series makers spend 99% of their time on the rest. Games with sex and tv series with boobs abound, the reason Fate SN or GoT succeeded isn't "because porn", even if it was part of the original recipe.

I feel like the fact that stuff like Fate and Tsukihime get all-age releases on home consoles is some data point to consider. That and the fact that F/SN is an amazingly long thing (like 50+ hours of reading?) for the handful of scenes... I mean that's a lot of work if it's for a CG pack!

Mixing good storytelling with porn in a visual format is really hard to do well. One or the other inevitably suffers. As someone who is pretty far into demisexuality, I would love to be able to find something visual that's more stimulating than erotic literature. The best compromise I've seen is 3d animated visual novels coming out of a select group of small indie studios. This still leans far more heavily into story than porn, the animation is repetitive and not very sexy at all, most of the time I skip through the sex scenes to get back to the story.

I guess if you're super-easily stimulated then you can look at any kind of serious video game with erotic elements as porn, instead of just as a sexy story/game. But if I want porn, I want porn. The moral element is unhelpful.

The original Fate VN is notorious for the porn bits being hilariously poorly written compared to the rest. They basically only exist because the porn is a staple of the format.

I don't need to be reminded. I've played all the Fate/Nasu games before FGO.

I liked it better when Fate was porn and not Gacha. Not because of the porn, but because it was better as a setting.

I thought Fate/Extra and Fate/Extella were sublime, not so much because of the gameplay, which was adequate, but because of the character development.

As an avid Fate/Grand Order (aka FGO) player of 7 years and counting, I can tell you it's because the writing is simply out of this world.

Type-Moon's (and specifically Nasu Kinoko's) writing is satisfying to read, and his prowess as a storyteller is the only reason why FGO has become the long-running smash success it is today.

Many other FGO ripoffs came and immediately died, including even one by the developers of FGO themselves (FGO development at the time was outsourced to DelightWorks by Type-Moon, Type-Moon just does the writing and supervision) because FGO's gameplay is straight concentrated dogshit.

... and the character design.

They made console releases that edited out the naughty bits.

http://archive.today/wQbAN

We Love Katamari was beautiful, and I'm glad it was made because the original was never released in Europe so we heard about this cultural phenomenon going on in the US and couldn't join in. I did eventually play it by illicit means when I managed to get my hands on a PS2 HD Loader disk...

The final level of WLK is very memorable, if only because there was a party around the time, we happened to be playing it as guests arrived, and it didn't get switched off all night as couples and ad-hoc pairings had a go at making the biggest ever Katamari. For such a simple concept, it had almost universal appeal.

His next project, Noby Noby Boy, was just too weird and there was not enough game there IMHO.

I made do with the Katamari Mobile Java Game on symbian

Btw The game was on sale for $7.49 on Nintendo switch for the next 4 hours. Not shilling just saying that's a great price from 29.99.

Man, I wish we could all write a card to Keita, all the kids of the 00’s, and tell him thanks for a good time rolling around.

Takahashi's new game (which this article seems to be promoting) is called to a T and is coming out on Steam and XBox: https://annapurnainteractive.com/en/games/to-a-t

   "But Takahashi ended his involvement with the franchise and its publisher, Bandai Namco, long ago. He continues to live in the shadow of the katamari, experiencing the strange conditions of an industry where artistic creations become valuable intellectual property for companies. He says he does not receive any royalties from the sales of Katamari games."

He was a full-time employee of Namco at the according to another part of the article. Do game producers get royalties for IP they come up with in a large company? I'm guessing no.

I sat next to a guy who made one of the arcade titles at Namco and the primary benefit to him was he got the opportuntiy to come to work at their USA R&D office. The Japanese employees got paid a lot more to work in the USA (though still less than Americans in the same office) and had a car and housing allowance and (if you see this as a benefit) got to live in America for a while. The pay if they stayed in Japan to work at the home office was pretty low, even compared to programmer/designer salary in a LCOL area of the USA, according to one of the guys who told us this over after work drinks.

…which is exactly the problem. Our society has been structured around the idea that owning is more important than creating or doing.

>Do game producers get royalties for IP they come up with in a large company? I'm guessing no.

Should they though? We treat the games industry just like any other software, but really games as a business are a lot more like Hollywood movies. They have a release date, a hype cycle, a launch, and they either flop or succeed. It's not like a SAAS that chugs along generating value for years. Why shouldb't the creators receive royalties just like a film writer?

i am all for sharing profit among employees, but who are the creators? of a game or movie? on large productions there are hundreds of people. which of them are responsible for its success? and what about those who work on productions that were not successful?

there are probably a few people who are somewhat directly responsible for the success, graphic designers, directors, writers, lead actors, but everyone else just contributes whatever they are asked to do.

is it fair that those who get assigned to work on a successful production get a share of the profit, while those who got assigned to work on an unsuccessful one don't?

in the end, a success should be seen as the success of the whole company, and profit should be shared with everyone, and not just those who were lucky to work on the production that made the profit.

They used to. When I first started in the games industry the creators got a significant royalty. But back then it might have been one primary creator who probably did a lot of the dev as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36950382

I bought "Beautiful Katamari" back in the day - $120(NZ) for the imported (same region) copy.

Half of the levels on the map were day 1 DLC - individually purchasable if I remember rightly.

Excellent game, greedy bastards.

I was ranked top 50 in the world for Amazing Katamari Damacy.

Everything legal in the world is fucking horseshit part nine hundred ninety two million.

Another good person just given the shit end. No recourse.

Brutal world. Would not play Hell Mode again.

It’s easy to say things like this, when you forget the upside to being a salaried employee: not being exposed to financial downside risk.

exactly, besides I can't imagine that this game would exist without his full time job and time to experiment

Like health insurance not paying when you need it? Or becoming the fall guy when your bosses do something illegal like cheating on emissions tests? PLEASE, there is no reason to sing your superior praises for raises they won't come and they don't even need the shitty takeover propaganda any longer.

NYT is the biggest trashiest rag out there. Why is anyone linking that paid subscription to see their nonsense of a site.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com