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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 · Adjusted expiry 2026-08-22 (estimated)
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Dates on the curated countdown pages are USPTO-adjusted expiration dates (verified against USPTO/Google Patents legal-status data as of July 2026, including patent-term adjustment); they still assume maintenance fees keep being paid, and are not a legal determination. Dates in the searchable database are raw patent-term math (20 years from filing, or the older 17-from-grant rule) that ignores adjustments, extensions, and terminal disclaimers. 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
Frequently asked questions
What happens on the countdown date?
That date is the patent's USPTO-adjusted expiration — verified individually against USPTO legal-status data (patent-term adjustment included) in July 2026. When it passes, the patent's term has ended and the claimed invention enters the public domain. It's still an estimate of status, not a legal ruling.
Is the countdown date guaranteed?
It's much stronger than raw patent-term math — each date on the countdown list was checked against USPTO-adjusted expiration data — but it still assumes maintenance fees keep being paid (a lapse would only make the death earlier), and it isn't a legal determination. Confirm against USPTO records before relying on it.
Can I build the invention once it expires?
Once the term ends, the specific claimed invention generally becomes free to make, use, or sell without a license. Other patents or rights may still cover a particular product; this isn't legal advice.