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Dying · US7402104B2
Video game apparatus, storage medium storing video game program, and video game controlling method (Katamari's rolling-and-attaching mechanic)
Outside the trading corpus, in the gaming wing: the patent covering Katamari Damacy's core mechanic — rolling a sticky ball that gathers objects and grows — is estimated to enter the public domain August 22, 2026.
Assignee: Namco Limited · Filed 2004 (estimated) · Granted 2008 · Est. expiry 2026-08-22 (estimated)
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Dates here are estimates from patent-term math (20 years from filing, or the older 17-from-grant/20-from-filing rule for pre-1995 filings), not a legal determination. They ignore patent-term adjustments, extensions, and terminal disclaimers, and don't reflect maintenance-fee lapses that haven't happened yet. This is not legal advice.
Katamari Damacy's whole game is one sentence: roll a ball, everything smaller than the ball sticks to it, the ball grows, repeat. That mechanic — an object that accretes mass by rolling over smaller objects, changing what it can pick up as it grows — is the subject of Namco's patent, filed not long before the game's 2004 debut.
For twenty-plus years, 'the katamari mechanic' as a formal game-design pattern has carried a license shadow, even though plenty of games have flirted with growth-by-rolling in ways that stayed just far enough from Namco's specific claims.
This is the one grave on this site with a resurrection already queued: on death day, a playable katamari-mechanic demo unlocks at /gaming/katamari — not before. Until then, the countdown is the whole page.
Estimated date. Gaming patents sit outside the trading-patent corpus this site's database was built from, so this one is tracked by hand rather than pulled from patents.db — treat the date as directional, not database-verified.
Patent record: not in the trading corpus — tracked by hand, see note below
Gaming-wing page (resurrection unlocks on death day): /gaming/katamari