The final stretch of Katamari Damacy and its credits are one of those moments in my life as a player that I will always remember with special affection. What was achieved by Keita Takahashi on PS2 is the best example of what it means to be a good creative and game designer.
Rolling a ball around collecting objects until you got a spherical monster capable of razing entire countries was not only a fun idea, it was also something unique and innovative. A maxim that the designer has always maintained, even when he decided to stop making games for create a playground.
From designing video games to creating a playground
Although the passing of the years brought him back into the fold, there was a time when Takahashi He made our hearts sink in all of our hearts by deciding to step away from game development. Tired of the dynamics of the industry, the genius decided to close a stage to return to his origins in a way as crazy as his games: he wanted design a playground.
Despite having the honor of being one of the first 14 video game creators to enter MoMA with Katamari Damacy, actually his beginnings go back to the world of sculpture, which he ended up abandoning in search of something that was not limited to making projects to present and throw away at the university.
Precisely from there came his experience as a playground designer And when the opportunity arose to return to that world professionally, he said that the idea of creating something to play with away from the screens could be a fun challenge.
“Although playing in front of a television can be fun, I wanted to get in touch with a kind of fun with a more direct and simple experience, being outdoors and moving your body. Besides, playgrounds are free and public, right? I admire that way of breaking with the economy.”
The playground of our dreams
Having released Nobi Nobi Boy just a year earlier, Keita Takahashi He surprised locals and strangers by announcing that the city council of Nottingham, in Great Britain, had chosen him to design a new children’s playground. The twist that the creative gave to the idea was clearly surreal, but coming from playing with his creations it was even logical.
“I hope whole families can enjoy the park together. It will be great if their pets can enjoy the equipment too. Both playgrounds and video games are fun things. They’re not really that different.”
When they began to appear first sketches Takahashi playground, the reaction made us sail between two waters. The first was that this undoubtedly looked as crazy as it was funny. Something worthy of the creator of the mythical Katamari.
The second was that, although those of us who grew up between slides and giant metal buckets remember what fun and exciting they were, no one in their right mind would let kids get on something like that without being lined with head-to-toe airbags. Unfortunately we weren’t too far off the mark.
swings and catapults
The craziest ideas of Takahashi They didn’t make the cut for obvious reasons. Leaving giant pieces that the kids could move from here to there with complete freedom predicted more than one theft despite devising a system of magnets that could limit theft, and riding roller coasters of chairs without any type of protection aimed to cause quite a few problems to the town hall. To put two of the clearest examples.
After associating with a company dedicated to this type of construction ´-that could provide the necessary experience to be able to carry it out-, Takahashi He shed light on the project again with a post -now disappeared- in which he talked about the changes that had been devised to bring his ideas down to Earth.
The result aimed to be an equally interesting project, but the crisis of the real estate bubble and budget problems slowed down the approval of the works and, with the passage of time, the participation of the Japanese creative in the works vanished. With this, what could have been the ultimate playground ended up canceled.
Over time, Takahashi returned to the world of videogames with different developments such as the recent Wattam, or the project of Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure for Playdate, as well as exhibitions about his career.
Although we will always celebrate his return, his insane playground would certainly have been the perfect excuse to travel to Nottingham. Shortly after the project was cancelled, when talking about his return to video game design, he commented:
“I want to become a billionaire. So I can set up my own playground.”