Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi is coming back to games, but probably not the way you'd expected. Tiny Speck revealed today Takahashi recently (last week!) moved to Vancouver, and is joining their development staff.
"A few months ago we were lucky enough to start talking to him," said co-founder Stewart Butterfield in a blog post. "We played some Glitch together, batted ideas back and forth and found that we shared the same values--deep beliefs in curiosity, humor, absurdity, and above all a belief in the positive power of play. It was like talking to an old friend and it did not take long before we decided that we had to work together."
Butterfield was also a co-founder of Flickr, leaving the photo service in 2008 to start Tiny Speck.
The studio's first creation is the in-development Glitch, currently in alpha, is probably best understood by watching a trailer, but in essence, it's a massively multiplayer social online game focused on co-operation to help save a planet by travelling through time. Time travel's cool in my book!
It's unclear what Takahashi's role at Tiny Speck will be, but clearly, the team is jazzed.
"His power of imagination and ability to realize something wholly unique and different stands out in the history of games," said Butterfield. "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.'"
Whatever Takahashi's working on, at least he's back in games.
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