After unleashing the wonderfully surreal Katamari and Noby Noby Boy on the world, Keita Takahashi appears to stop making games altogether. Or has he...?
Keita Takahashi is one of the videogame industry’s great non-conformists. Artistic and imaginative, he’s also very, very odd.
His first commercial game, the magnificent Katamari Damacy for the PlayStation 2, immediately established Takahashi as a uniquely individual designer. The game’s surreal humour and quirky central mechanic - which required the player to roll an adhesive sphere around a play area, picking up increasingly large pieces of litter - earned it instant critical acclaim, if only middling sales.
Its sequel, We Love Katamari, was a bigger hit, and unlike its predecessor, was successfully launched outside of Japan too.
While the Katamari series continued, Takahashi wasn’t involved in their development, and he chose instead to concentrate on another project, the download-only Noby Noby Boy for the PS3.
Retaining Takahashi’s trademark visual style, Noby Noby Boy’s goal was even more abstract and unconventional than Katamari’s free-roaming litter-picking, and involved stretching the worm-like Boy of the title with the analogue sticks, and interacting with its surreal world of apparently random objects and characters
Always a man of eclectic interests - he initially studied sculpture at art school, as opposed to game design - Takahashi has, over the past year, appeared to have grown tired of the videogames industry, and parted company with publisher Namco shortly after the release of Noby Noby Boy in 2009.
A few months after that departure, Takahashi was commissioned to design a children’s playground for Nottingham County Council, a move which is rendered less surprising in light of the virtual sandboxes his games provided
In August this year, a visit to the E3 expo appeared to alienate Takahashi further from the games industry. “At E3 I saw people putting on speeches but I thought the future seemed a bit dark,” he said. “The 3D games didn't spark my interest. I think motion control's a bit old now, I don't think those games are the future. It all seemed a bit dull.”
But just as it looked as though Takahashi had left the realm of videogames for good, there’s a fresh glimmer of hope that he may yet return to the field, as a new website for his company, called Uvula, has appeared.
On it, Takahashi writes, “We mainly work with music and video games. However we have started designing a playground recently. We want to widen our horizons.”
A blog post, which includes a picture of Takahashi apparently rolling down a grassy hill, simply states, “This is Keita Takahashi. I became a freelancer in October. I want to continue fun activities and help somebody with fun people of the world along with my wife who is a composer. You will see my status (Whether I'm alive or I'm not alive) if you look at this page. Thank you.”
Elsewhere, there are pictures of a papier mache goat that doubles as a flower box, a tissue-dispensing hippo, and a Japanese coffee table that transforms into a robot.
We sincerely hope that the site is a sign that Takahashi will return to videogame design very soon - without him, the games industry is deprived of one of its most imaginative and unconventional creative thinkers.
Uvula