This is the best summary I could come up with:

“I cannot forget that moment when everyone started laughing,” Takahashi recalled from his office in the garage of the San Francisco home where he lives with his wife, Asuka Sakai, a composer, and their two children.

A demo at the 2003 Game Developers Conference in San Jose caught the attention of industry leaders at a time when the market was mostly focused on multiplayer shooters like Medal of Honor and Halo.

There was no guaranteed global market for a game with a flamboyant deity known as the King of All Cosmos, who transforms katamaris into stars, replacing the constellations he accidentally hip-checked out of existence during a drunken pirouette across the universe.

“It feels like Katamari Damacy escaped Japan by accident,” said Paul Galloway, a collection specialist at the Museum of Modern Art who helped establish its video game program, which includes Takahashi’s debut.

Instead, Takahashi moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to help the co-founder of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, develop a massively multiplayer online game called Glitch.

The experiment fizzled out within a year, but the development team he left behind continued working on the internal communications system it had created for the game — a messaging program now called Slack.

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