The Allure of a Sticky Ball: THE VIRTUAL ARTIST

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Can't stand video games? Then you may be on your way to becoming a top game designer. That, at least, is the counterintuitive experience of Keita Takahashi, the Japanese creator of the offbeat international hit known as Katamari Damacy. The addictive game involves a cosmic prince rolling a sticky ball around a colorful landscape filled with things to pick up; it looks like manga meets Monty Python and sounds like Hello Kitty does hip-hop, and that has everything to do with the creator's inexperience. "I don't play games," he insists. "There are too many unoriginal ones." In 1999 when he took a job as a 3-D artist to pay the bills at game company Namco, the Tokyo-based Takahashi didn't even own a PlayStation, that near ubiquitous Japanese device. He was an art-school graduate with a passion for sculpting bizarre objects like goat-shaped flowerpots. Living in a tactile world, he didn't see the point in a virtual one. Why jump into a pixilated version of a car when you've got a real one sitting in your driveway? But then the sticky-ball idea rolled, fully formed, into Takahashi's head. What would it feel like, he wondered, to push such an object? The game was a modest success in Japan. But when it reached the U.S. last fall, retailers couldn't keep it on the shelves. "I'm happy going through this games phase of my life, where I get paid and can eat," Takahashi says. He may not understand his fame, in other words, but he's rolling with it. --By Chris Taylor