Keita Takahashi, one of the most skilled video game designers and best known for Katamari Damacy has today released the game almost after six years of development efforts, Wattam on Playstation 4 and PC. Takahashi has impressively made a reputation for making video games that are eccentric, sincere, and absurd.
Behind the efforts of creating Wattam, there is one more name to be highlighted in terms of development Robin Hunicke, Co-founder of Funomena.
Wattam demonstrates the trademark humor, said Harry DeLorme, who exhibited a survey of Takahashi’s work this year at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Ga. DeLorme pointed out that one Wattam character is a mouth that eats other characters and excretes them as poop. “It’s full of very strange things,” he said.
“He showed the gameplay, but then he went all the way to the credits screen,” Hunicke said. “You get to the point where you can roll up all the countries on Earth. And so you’re making a Katamari of all of us. Keita said, in a very heartfelt way, that he had been destroyed by the idea that we were going to keep fighting and killing each other.
The idea of producing Wattam came up when he shifted to Vancouver and was living in a place with a diverse population. He still believes to have some errors or conflicts in the world. Today, because of the war, fighting, and protest between religion, perspective, and skin color is highly seen in society.
While designing Wattam, Takahashi wanted players to realize a kind of reverence for the routine objects that we usually ignore. He said that in our fast-fashion economy, it’s pretty easy to treat necessary things as if they are expendable. “I wanted to make people realize there are no unnecessary things,” he said. “A cup. A chopstick. Those are very important.”
Keita Takahashi is committed to being a creative person and has proudly received a degree in creation and sculpture from the Musashino Art University of Japan. At the starting stage of his career, he contributed his work as a design creative person at Namco, where he was honored to handle the lead developer of Katamari Damacy, a non-iconic game that earned awards, influenced a massive culture, spawned sequels in the sports industry.
