Katamari Damacy creator making Glitch

Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi has returned to game development with Glitch, a massively multiplayer browser game.

Glitch, from Tiny Speck, takes place inside the minds of 11 Giants, according to the official website. "You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one persistent world."

Announcing the collaboration, Tiny Speck revealed Takahashi has already left Tokyo to join the development team in Vancouver, Canada.

"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'.

"A few months ago we were lucky enough to start talking to him. We played some Glitch together, batted ideas back and forth and found that we shared the same values - deep beliefs in curiosity, humour, absurdity, and above all a belief in the positive power of play."

Takahashi is the brains behind oddball collection game Katamari Damacy, and downloadable curiosity Noby Noby Boy.

He quit publisher Namco Bandai in 2010 after 11 years working for the company.

"The reason why I quit Namco was because I started to feel like I didn't belong there any more," Takahashi told Eurogamer last year.

"The games I was making were not necessarily the best-selling ones. I realised Namco was, as a business, going down a bit.

"Also, my colleagues were leaving to do another project. I started to feel like I didn't belong there any more."

Takahashi directed three games during his time with Namco Bandai: Katamari Damacy, sequel We Love Katamari and Noby Noby Boy, but his original Katamari game spawned the release of five sequels.

After leaving Namco Takahashi set up a new company, called uvula, with his composer wife Asuka Sakai.

Beta testing for Glitch is now underway.