He’s a fantastic character to work with that we were able to have a lot of fun wrapping him around corners and text in the inside pages. Hopefully when people see his rainbow body stretching across, they’re encouraged to actually unfold the magazine and reveal him in full. It’s very satisfying to follow his body all throughout the image, and I’m glad we had enough canvas space to show him off properly! With this approach he’s technically on the front of the publication, but only a part of him. Boy actually stretches the whole width of the cover from one gatefold to another, with his head being a whopping 600 mm away from his lower half. With the cover having gatefolds and panoramic art, it meant that we really wanted to do something interesting with those elements. When it came to Boy, from the wonderful 2009 PlayStation 3 game Noby Noby Boy, it felt like a good chance to do something creative. We really wanted to make sure that the ‘big three’ games that Keita is known for - Katamari, Wattam, and Noby Noby Boy - all had representation in some way on the main ‘face’ of the image (what magazine readers would see before opening the issue). The Prince has such an iconic design it was almost a shame to make him so hard to see, but we made sure to get his cute face close up on the illustrations inside the magazine. He needed to be small enough to be able to stand comfortably on his father’s palm, as he does in the original Katamari Damacy when a level is completed. In terms of finalizing the size, we just wanted to make sure that he was proportionally correct next to the King of All Cosmos. There’s a lot going on already in the image, so it was really useful to be able to integrate him in this unobstructive way. Having him be tiny not only felt true to the source material, but meant we could have more space for scenery and other characters on the main face of the cover. It’s actually quite easy to miss him entirely now. Can you see him? We play with scale a lot in this image, but it was important to everyone involved that the Prince remained small, especially relative to other characters.

Katamari damacy yellow paintbrush