A drunken cosmic king destroys every star in the sky and sends his five-centimeter-tall son to Earth with a sticky ball to rebuild the universe. This episode tells the story of Keita Takahashi, the Musashino Art University sculpture student who joined Namco as a visual artist in 1999, had a pitch about hammer-headed drivers steering pedestrians rejected, and then synthesized an unreleased Sony prototype called Densen with the Japanese schoolyard ball-rolling sport tamakorogashi into Katamari Damacy.

It follows how Takahashi built a prototype without authority or budget by routing his asset list through a Namco student training program, recruiting arcade engineers facing layoffs, and prototyping on GameCube when PlayStation 2 tools were not ready. The episode covers the shrinking mechanic that was cut, the tiny budget that kept executives away, the four pillars of novelty, ease of understanding, enjoyment and humor, the Battlezone-inspired dual-stick controls he refused to change, Yu Miyake’s eclectic soundtrack, the 2003 Tokyo Game Show buzz, the fan campaign that brought the game to North America in 2004, and its 2012 induction into the Museum of Modern Art.

• Why Takahashi saw video games as an infinite canvas for practical, playful sculpture
• How the rejected Action Drive pitch supplied the King and the Prince
• How a student lab and laid-off engineers became a shadow studio inside Namco
• Why losing progress was cut in favor of relentless, satisfying growth
• What Sony’s commercial, the Good Design Award and MoMA curation said about the game’s legacy