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 aw ...