The offbeat, wonderful Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari

✨💝This NYT article is gift-linked, so there's no paywall.💝✨

Okay, the actual NYT headline is "He Created the Katamari Games, but They’re Rolling On Without Him" but I think this article is much more than that. It really shows Mr. Takahashi as this marvelously offbeat artist who has gone against the grain since university.

Takahashi, 48, never intended to become a game designer; he originally trained as a sculptor at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. However, the young artist became disillusioned as classmates disposed of their creations after each assignment. “I realized that making art was not exactly useful,” he said.

That is why when a professor asked him to create a goat sculpture, he decided to turn the animal into a flower pot that drained excess water from its udders.

The seed for the idea of Katamari:

Takahashi joined what was then Namco as an artist in 1999 despite being cut in an interview round with the company’s executives; a colleague from the selection process persuaded the bosses to take a chance. That was how most of his career there went: by the skin of his teeth.

Corporate leaders opted not to develop an early idea from Takahashi, one in which a small prince could hijack humans by connecting a steering wheel to their heads and driving them around like cars. But during a work commute, he thought about something spinning and collecting things, gradually growing bigger.

He also tried his hand at designing... playgrounds!

But by 2009, Takahashi announced he was leaving video games, saying he would help design a playground in England.

Be sure to check out the playground idea sketches in the article. 🙂

Last month, the publisher Annapurna Interactive released a preview for Takahashi’s upcoming game, to a T, which features a teenage boy who appears to be stuck in a T-pose, his arms outstretched like a familiar video game glitch. The boy needs the help of a fluffy dog to complete basic tasks such as brushing his teeth while he learns to embrace his mysterious condition.

“I know our lives are not so fun. They are boring. We do the same things over and over,” Takahashi said. “But we should be celebrating the good things in life. Then we can become better people. That’s my thing right now.”