Namco Bandai has announced that Keita Takahashi’s Katamari Damacy will be featured in the NY Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit is called Century of the Child: Growing by Design and it will be on display from July 29, 2012 through November 5, 2012. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
“NAMCO BANDAI Games’ KATAMARI DAMACY has touched countless people, from children to adults, and is truly a modern video game classic,” said Carlson Choi, Vice President of Marketing, NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. “The inclusion of KATAMARI DAMACY in this ground breaking exhibit is a testament to the creative designs embodied in NAMCO BANDAI’s games and shows the importance of video games in peoples’ lives in addition to being a validation of video games as a modern form of interactive art.”
Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, is the New York MoMA’s ambitious survey of 20th century design for children. The exhibit is the first large-scale overview of the modernist preoccupation with children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking. The exhibition brings together areas underrepresented in design history and often considered separately, including school architecture, clothing, playgrounds, children’s hospitals and safety equipment, nurseries, furniture, and books. KATAMARI DAMACY will be featured within a section of the exhibition that concentrates on toys and game design.
This is awesome news for Namco Bandai. I love that a videogame is being featured in a MoMA exhibit. However, I was a bit disappointed that Takahashi wasn’t mentioned in the press release at all. It’s fantastic that the game is being celebrated, but its designer should be as well.
