Run a Katamari All Over This (and Any) Site

Are you browsing this page on Google Chrome right now? Well, you’re going to want to. Some saint of a coder has developed an utterly delightful hack that rolls up all of a Web page’s text and pictures, Katamari-style.

How’s it work? Pasting a piece of JavaScript into Chrome’s address bar activates the hack, which reloads the page and separates all of its parts – words, images, etc. – into individual items. Just like the game, as the Katamari gets bigger it’s able to roll up larger items. The Katamari hack will provide you with hours of time-killing, frustration-dissipating fun on any Web page – your least favorite news network, your least favorite celebrity’s Twitter, your most favorite site whose redesign you dislike, anything!

Did we mention there’s a multiplayer feature? By going to the Katamari Hack Web site and pasting in a URL, you create a game session (listed on that site) which allows other people to join in.

GamePro, which spotted the hack yesterday, noted that the creator “has seemingly taken great pains to remain anonymous.” The page was originally hosted on an anonymous Amazon Web Services site. He seems to be out in the open now, as the code has moved to the URL kathack.com, whose owner, a Seattle programmer, is identifiable by a WHOIS lookup.

If that page goes down to a surge of traffic, too, here’s the Javascript.

javascript:var h=’http://174.129.249.239/js/’,i,n,ss=[‘http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js’,h+’Renderables.js’,h+’Game.js’];for(i=0;i

Katamari Google Chrome Hack [kathack, via GamePro, thanks TheRagingPanda]