By Game Developer Magazine:

We recently received a request to publish the Katamari Damacy postmortem from the December 2004 issue of Game Developer. It has been posted here in full for the first time in 2024 to celebrate the game’s 20 year anniversary. Please enjoy.

This article was written by the game’s director, Keita Takahashi, and has been translated into English from the original Japanese. I wish I could find the original text, but this is a great read regardless.

It’s easy to take a successful game and say “Here are its unique features and the reasons why we think they led to success.” But this portmortem also includes regrets from the game’s development, which gives a really rare, close look into what the team’s ambitions were and how they thought about the game’s design.