KEITA TAKAHASHI
Katamari and Wattam designer Keita Takahashi tells us how he makes such unique games
A joyful chat with the Katamari and Wattam creator.
Keita Takahashi’s gaming work has a certain strangeness that’s extremely distinctive. It sees you rolling tiny objects into a ball to get bigger and bigger and then eventually create stars, and getting toilets and telephones to join hands to kaboom together in colourful explosions. His games are some of the silliest you’ll ever play, and some of the most introspective. So how does Takahashi do it? What better way to find out than to ask the man himself? He’s even given us some artistic interpretations to illustrate his game-making journey.
OPM: All your games have unique premises. How do you come up with a new idea? Keita Takahashi: I think I can come up with new ideas pretty easily. I can get new funny FPS ideas in a minute. But coming up with a better/great idea is just different and difficult. If I knew the way to come up with better ideas, I think I would become a billionaire. I want to know how to come up with a new great idea too.
OPM: Wattam is your first game on this generation of home consoles. Do you feel like there’s more freedom to explore ideas as technology becomes more powerful? KT: Of course more high spec machines would be good for me. Even Wattam, which looks so simple and cute graphics, but our engineers worked so hard to optimise it to keep 30fps. I know our optimisations were not enough to keep it 30fps at all situations, unfortunately. It’s a kinda complicated system more than you and also we expected. So I would say I’m happy about more powerful and efficient technology, and we will be able to get stable and decent performance without extra works. But also I know there are other things on the Earth which [are] called novels and manga. I know they can surprise or touching us so many times. And surprisingly they are made by just letters and drawings, but no particle effects, no sound effects, and no interaction. That’s just stories and pictures, which doesn’t require any futuristic technologies… Your question is “Do you feel like there’s more freedom to explore ideas as the technology becomes more powerful?” My answer is maybe or maybe not, it depends on the game
OPM: How did the idea for Wattam come about? KT: When I was living in Vancouver, Canada, I saw many different people there who came from other countries. Their native languages are not English but they get over their language barriers by using English as a common tool. That was very impressive for me. On the other hand, we still have so many fights and conflicts all over the world, and our differences are making them. Different perspectives, thoughts, benefits, religions, races, cultures etc etc, even [though] we all live on the same planet. That’s a very sad and silly thing. What if we all have the same language, skin colour, or perspective, maybe we will have less fights and conflicts than we have now. But also it would be a very boring world. I have believed our differences give us more wider/kind perspective and deeper/richer culture, but unfortunately our differences just keep making confusions and discriminations. I am not a superhero, but for some reason I thought I should try to make a videogame that can solve this problem with celebrating our differences, and go beyond our differences by having fun together. I knew this is a very abstract and ambitious concept (so it took a long time to finish Wattam, haha), but I thought I had to make such a videogame now because the world has been a mess for a long time.
“Differences give us more wider/ kind perspective and deeper/ richer culture.”
OPM: Your games often blend the line between introspection and being joyous, even silly, fun. Why are you drawn to this balance?
KT: Because my mind has so man y contradictions. I don’ t play videogames but I like to make videogames. I like to make videogames because it’s more interesting than jus t playing videogames, but videogames are unnecessary things. We can live without videog ames, but we can’t live without medicine , food, water, electricity, sewerage, etc etc. Those are more important than videog ames. To play videogames, we need to buy a console, PC or phone fir st, and s till need electricity, walls, roof, sofa, TV, AC etc etc. We need a lot t o play just videogames. Very luxurious thing s.
I see a lot of homeless people her e.
I have earned by making videog ames, which are unnecessary things.
But I have a f amily, and b asically making videogames is fun. I know this is kinda an extreme thought, but I think those contradictions make my games have different faces.
OPM: Wattam manages to capture an essence of childhood play and wonder at the world. Do you think this is something smaller studio games are able to explore more easily?
KT: I think I know what you mean, but it doesn’t matter if it’s big or small. I know some small studios feel like Triple-A studios because the executives are ex-Triple-A. And they just do what they have done before at a big company. So I can’t tell. OPM: How do you feel when you read reviews of a game you’ve released? KT: Just nervous. I have been trying to avoid reading any reviews, but I have read some by accident. I totally understand all negative reviews because I know Wattam is far from a decent commercial product. The development process was just tougher than you expect. I just feel so sorry when I saw tweets about Wattam’s unstable performance or design issues.