Video game creator Keita Takahashi

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Jesse Thorn

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Keita Takahashi is a video game creator and designer. He's responsible for the classic genre defining puzzle game Katamari Damacy. Keita Takahashi has a new game coming out soon. It's called to a T and it's about a child whose arms stick straight out like a "T". We talked with Keita Takahashi about how he got into designing video games and how he pitched the idea for Katamari Damacy to the folks at Namco. He also talks with us about his new game, to a T.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	On the Ted Radio Hour, engineer Saad Bamaela loves solving biological mysteries.
0:06.0	Like the strange way a bug in his backyard was peeing.
0:10.0	I was like, hey, there's something happening. There's a droplet at its butt and it's flicking it.
0:15.0	I said, all right.
0:17.0	Challenge accepted bug.
0:19.0	Animal Enigmas.
0:21.0	That's on the Ted Radio Hour from NPR.
0:23.6	Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of maximum fund
0:29.0	or is distributed by NPR. It's bullseye, I'm Jesse Forn. Like the best games, the idea is very simple. A ball rolls around.
0:58.0	Anything smaller than the ball sticks to it, and the ball gets bigger.
1:02.0	Anything bigger than the ball is an obstacle, a roadblock.
1:06.2	You bounce off that. Get the ball big enough to get the biggest thing, you move on to the next level.
1:13.4	If that game came out now, I guess it would be on your phone.
1:17.3	One of those apps that your kid accidentally drops 50 bucks in
1:21.0	to get star points. Probably not a story thing. It would be called Roll Ball
1:27.2	Deluxe or something. A million dollar idea. Done. But, Katamari Damasi, that is the name of the game we are talking about in real life.
1:39.0	Katamari Damasi came out in 2004 on PlayStation. At first it was a so-so success. Then it was a big
1:47.7	success. Now it is a legendary classic. And because it came out in 2004 and because of the unusual mind from which it came,
1:57.4	there is a story, a whopper of a story, the king of the Cosmos, who is a godlike, fancy royal being, has thrown the universe into chaos.
2:12.0	He's destroyed all the stars. He has made a mess of things and you a
2:16.3	tiny prince must rebuild it. Paper clip by paper clip then goose by goose
2:20.6	by goose cow by cow eventually cars and trucks and whole buildings.
	...

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