Katamari Damacy ReRoll Announced for December on Switch & Steam

Katamari Damacy is almost unplayable today. You can’t buy it online through any platforms or services.

The 2004 PlayStation 2 original game is out-of-print. The Xbox 360 sequel isn’t backwards compatible on the Xbox One. No Katamari has ever been available forWindows or any other desktop computing platform.

Mobile versions of the real Katamari existed on the iPhone, but aren’t available anymore. The only Katamari games that you can download on an iPhone today are free-to-play explorations of other game formulas like the modern clicker game or the endless runner. Those seem to exist solely to siphon off our shared nostalgia.

Katamari Damacy is just a great example of the difficulty in preserving original games in their original format. Hooking up a PlayStation 2, 3, or Xbox 360 is the only way to experience it today without walking in the harsh desert of emulator country and I haven’t even begun to explain why anyone who hasn’t played some version of Katamari would care about it.

It’s a game where you roll a big-ass ball around, it’s extremely weird, the ball collects things in a fictional version of our world and the things all have a kind of low-poly aesthetic. The ball is called a Katamari and it is being pushed by the Prince of the Cosmos under orders from his father, the King of the Cosmos. As you collect things the ball grows larger and larger until it’s finally going to roll up entire continents and at some point the level ends and the King is either satisfied with your work as the Prince or you can repeat the level. Some levels had annoying goals, it wasn’t perfect, but Katamari Damacy is missed by everyone who loved it. I still listen to some of the soundtrack with my family because it’s fun music that is approachable even to people who haven’t played a Katamari game.

I’m eternally grateful to whatever print magazine or 1UP.com show that told me about the original, because I wasn’t hooked into anywhere else that was talking about it when it was released in 2004.

All that said, this remaster of the original Katamari Damacy will finally be available on December 7th, 2018. Katamari Damacy ReRoll (it’s strangely an all-caps REROLL in the press release) on the Nintendo Switch as well as Steam for Windows. I don’t have a firm price available yet. ReRoll will also have new motion controls on the Switch. Very curious to see how well this game caps off our year of remasters and remakes as Katamari takes one more roll through the ephemerality pipeline.