Updated: KatamariDamacy.jp closes up shop
Posted by inpheaux on March 14th, 2006 at 11:58 am
UPDATE - 17MAR2006 @ 03:09 - Looks like smart money was on paranoia. After two years of dutiful service, katamaridamacy.jp has shut down. An initial translation of the page that remains seems to indicate that the assorted members of the dev team responsible for Katamari Damacy have gone their separate ways, so they've decided to close up the website. Furthermore, all the great content has not been put up in a convenient cold-storage archival form, it's all just gone.
While it's sad to see it go, and while it's even more distressing to hear that the Katamari dev team has split up - thus severely lowering the chances of any future Katamari Damacy games - I'm somewhat relieved. Turning Katamari Damacy into a full-on franchise with a constant stream of sequels would have sucked the soul from the game, a fate no series deserves, let alone one so special and different as Katamari Damacy.
Some of the lost content can still be had over at katamari.namco.com, but only some of it. You'll also have to suffer through an all-singing all-dancing brightly colored flash website to get to said content, but it's in there.
Anyways, we now return you to the slightly-more-upbeat previous content of this news post, which has now now been made irrelevant:
Please don your tinfoil hats, it's semi-unfounded rumor time.
Namco's official Katamari Damacy japanese-region website is closing. It's still up now, but it now has a splash page announcing the impending closure and a large friendly image counting down to this Friday, March 17th.
This isn't a new occurance. They've done this before. Specifically, they did it about a year ago when the original Katamari Damacy website was "closed" and almost immediately replaced with the current We <3 Katamari website.
Furthermore, Friday is apparently the day weekly gaming magazines hit the streets in Japan. And going even more beyond that, Saturday, March 18th is the two-year anniversary of Katamari Damacy's original release in Japan.
So . . should we be expecting the announcement of a third proper Katamari Damacy? We'll know Friday.
Oh, and even though no content is ever really lost between incarnations of the Katamari Damacy Website, now probably wouldn't be a bad time for us paranoid folks to grab everything we could ever want from the wallpaper section.
Source: 1up
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