Computer gaming start-up Tiny Speck today announced that they have hired Katamari Damacy developer Keita Takahashi to work on their fittingly unusual massively-multiplayer game Glitch.
The news was revealed today on Tiny Speck's official Twitter account and blog.
"Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy has always been a hero to everyone on the Glitch team," Tiny Speck founder Stewart Butterfield wrote on the company's blog. "His power of imagination and ability to realize something wholly unique and different stands out in the history of games.
"We know how hard it is to defy convention and make something entirely new. So we've always had tremendous respect for Keita's work and we were sad for games when we read a few years ago that he was pulling back from the industry because it was all getting 'a bit dull'."
In Glitch, players inhabit an ever-evolving persistent world that exists inside the minds of supernatural creatures. It is meant to be a collaborative simulation, with the community paving the path the game takes and the way the world emerges.
Tiny Speck was founded in 2009 by Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr and Ludicorp,. While Tiny Speck hasn't yet released a video game, their social massively multiplayer online role-playing game Glitch is currently in beta and due out later this year.
Takahashi gamed fame after coming up with the idea for Katamari Damacy while a student at the Namco Digital Hollywood Game Laboratory. He later went on to help develop sequel We Love Katamari and Noby Noby Boy.
Stay tuned for our full interview with Takahashi and Butterfield.