Last month, the feature phone preservationist RockmanCosmo announced that a group of individuals had managed to find and extract the files for Katamari Damacy-Kun and its sequel Oi Katamari Damacy-Kun from an i-mode compatible phone. And it now seems that they've made some encouraging strides to adding yet another Katamari Damacy title to the ever-growing list of preserved i-Mode games, preserving a pre-loaded version of Katamari Damacy Mobile.
Just to give you some context, Katamari Damacy Mobile was an impressive Japan-exclusive mobile port of the PS2 title that was released way back in 2007 for a small number of DoCoMo phones. It featured a choice of a traditional control scheme and motion controls, with the title taking advantage of a new piece of camera technology on P904i phone models that could detect the device's movements and would allow the player to guide the Katamari around the screen by tilting the screen.
It also later served as the basis for the 2011 smartphone port Katamari Damacy Mobile Plus for iOS and Android — both of which were similarly never released outside of Japan.
As RockmanCosmo stated on Twitter earlier this week, the preloaded version that is now preserved was dumped from a P904i, and sadly only features one level from the finished game.
The other levels would have been readily available to download at the time of release, but it appears that the group will, unfortunately, now have to go through the process of looking for another phone with the rest of the data unlocked to preserve those stages as well.
Regardless, it's amazing that at least some of the game is now free of its feature phone prison and playable on PC via an emulator, and we applaud RockmanCosmo, Memory Hunter, and the other members of the group for their continuing efforts to save these types of games from oblivion.
If you want to learn more about how to access the game and get it working in an emulator, we recommend checking out the Keitai Wiki Discord. This is the new home of the Japanese feature phone preservation community online.