Wherever you’re reading this, take a second to look around you. If you’re at home, you might notice, I don’t know, your stove. You might see your cat, or your stereo, or your rug. If you’re out and about, you might see the leaves on the ground, the cars on the street, the people around you. Take note of it all—it’s life. Our lives are made up of a million different objects and beings, all with different purposes, but all here at once—separated in form, united in a space we call Earth. What if all of life’s materials, trivial and essential alike, came together as one? What does everything look like, and what does it mean?
These are the far-out ideas that Namco’s 2004 cult masterpiece Katamari Damacy (“Clump Spirit” in English) dares to tackle. In Keita Takahashi’s practically buttonless PlayStation 2 game, you use only the control sticks to navigate the five-centimeter-tall royal heir known simply as the Prince around bedrooms and fields and cities. Your task is to roll up everything in your path—objects, people, animals, nature—into magical spheres called katamaris, which turn from grotesque balls of material into beautiful stars. This is all done to appease the King of All Cosmos, the Prince’s Dionysian father who talks in record scratches and once destroyed all the previous stars in the sky in a drunken rage. Pretty normal, right?
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Takahashi’s crowning opus is idiosyncrasy in its truest form, a wildly original work whose programmed absurdities—like its ingeniously simple gameplay, at once domestic and outlandish graphics, and hilariously charming premise—challenge you to reconsider the deeper meaning behind life’s moving parts. It defies every convention imaginable: genre, gameplay, value, reason. There’s nothing like it, which is funny, considering it’s a game where the most familiar objects of our lives are at play—even the most humdrum, like nail clippers and sticks of gum.
