Folks, there’s one thing I like as much as playing games and that thing is reading. Why not combine those joys with the Boss Fight Books collection? A month or so ago I’ve read through the book on Metal Gear Solid, by Anthony and Ashly Burch. Now, let’s take our reading club to something more niche yet just as remarkable: Katamari Damacy.

Katamari Damacy is an iconic game where a really tiny boy rolls around a ball that collects objects, with the general goal of rolling up the biggest hunk of junk as possible. Under the Boss Fight Books banner, Katamari Damacy was covered by Laura E. Hall, a designer that works under many hats engaging the intersections between art, culture and technology. Her book is more of a traditional non-fiction book in comparison to the Burches’ project, but her documentation on Katamari, its history and its culture is still just an engaging.

When you hear about the histories behind games, you usually only hear the stories of famous ones. The story of Shigeru Miyamoto exploring as a child imprinting into the Legend of Zelda series is a generally known one. You may know about the rise of Toby Fox if you’ve been around the internet, especially during the Homestuck days. However, before I read this book, Katamari creator Keita Takahashi was an enigma to me, and it does an excellent job at putting together his story in a central, easy to digest way.

The first portions of the book acts as a bit of a biography for Takahashi, discussing his history with art, his philosophy of using art to bring smiles to people, and his successful goal of bringing that philosophy into the games space. There’s actually a lot of interesting history surrounding Katamari Damacy, like how it built off of a Crazy Taxi-esque prototype called Action Drive. For a game so iconic, people wouldn’t think that it took an uphill battle for the game to get made or that it wasn’t originally planned to be brought to the west until a fateful presentation.

The gameplay isn’t talked about too much, but really, it doesn’t have to be. The original Katamari Damacy aimed to be a simple, understandable game with a lot of unnecessary clutter taken out. Complex ideas and feelings are instead derived from how a player reacts to the situations its simple concept of rolling a growing ball around is put in. Much like how players perceived Katamari Damacy, Hall derives a lot of topics from the game, from its simple story and possible themes to how audiences at the time received it.

All this makes the brief coverage of Katamari games beyond Takahashi’s directed two feel bittersweet, with the simple game design and inherent joy stripped away for the sake of safe cash. However, the original Katamari Damacy was not safe, but a risk, and it’s a risk that still resonates with people.

If you’re a fan of Katamari Damacy, either an old fan or one brought into the fold by the REROLL re-release, this is a must-read. Heck, if you’re just fascinated by game culture in general, this is just a book worth checking it out.

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