July 20^th, 2004 (12:00am) - Leading video games publisher and developer Namco Hometek Inc. announced today that the highly addictive and innovative action game, Katamari Damacy, will be coming to the U.S. market in September. The ever expanding, article accumulating, swiftly swelling sphere game that is fun for the whole family is set to ship exclusively on the PlayStation2 computer entertainment system.

“Eccentric, quirky, weird, goofy, wild, outrageous, addictive, intriguing, charismatic and captivating -- they all apply,” said Rod Nakamoto, Executive Vice President of Research and Development for Namco Hometek Inc. “There are many words to describe Katamari Damacy -- and the most important one is FUN.”

In Katamari Damacy, players take on the role of Prince of the Cosmos, whose father – the great King – managed to inadvertently knock the stars out of the sky. As the prince, a player’s duty is to clean up the King’s mess and re-create the starry skies by rolling around the cleverly designed locations to collect objects and build up their “katamari” -- a Japanese word for clump or large mass. The catch is that it’s not the quality or the actual number of objects gathered that is most critical to the player’s success, but instead the sheer size of the player’s “katamari” that is most important.

Along the way, players can roll over hundreds of unusual objects of all sizes and shapes including cookies, cars, mermaids, planes, clouds and even people. The larger the player’s “katamari” grows, the more objects the player can amass along the way -- thus proving if you want to succeed in Katamari Damacy -- size does matter.

Katamari Damacy features a single-player story mode and a two-player battle mode. The simple game play mechanics allow for optimal ball rolling and object collecting fun.

Namco’s “rolling, sticking, never-stopping, ever-swelling clump of stuff that makes a star out of everyone and everything” game will be available this fall.