Just like any other form of art, developing a video game is no small achievement.
While some game franchises have become a well oiled machine, pumping out iterations every
year, there are development studios that struggle immensely to get their games to the public.
Whether you’re talking about an indie game or a triple A title, the probability of delays
or worse, cancelling the whole game, is very real.
There have been multiple examples of games being stuck in development hell, but today
we’re looking at a more recent example, namely The Last Guardian, an exclusive title
for the PS4.
Its development lasted roughly 10 years, causing it to jump a console generation in between.
After the development studio, Team Ico, finished work on the critically acclaimed “Shadow
Of The Colossus”, gamers couldn’t wait for what they had in store next.
Luckily for gamers, Fumito Ueda, the director of both Ico and Shadow of The Colossus, was
eager to jump into his next project.
In 2005, he started forming initial ideas about his studio’s next game, right after
the release of Shadow Of The Colossus.
Fumito thought about what he and his team wanted to communicate and portray to the player
with Shadow Of The Colossus:
“For me it was the main relationship between Wander and the girl, but after the release,
I read a lot of feedback from players who were touched by the game, and they said that
the relationship between Wander and the horse was the most important and appealing – we
got the sense that this was what most people felt.
I thought OK, if that’s the case, there are a lot of mechanics from that relationship
that we could heighten and expand on.
That’s where The Last Guardian came from.”
Ironically, he also considered that his previous games took a long time to develop and wanted
to avoid this for his next project even going as far as saying that The Last Guardian was
a project that began from reflecting on the long time spent making Ico and Shadow of the
Colossus.
Things obviously didn’t work out the way he wanted to.
Active development on The Last Guardian started in 2007, a year after the release of the Playstation
3.
In 2008 the public got wind of Team Ico’s third installment through a job listing on
Sony Japan’s website.
After two years, enough work was done to showcase the game for the first time at E3 in 2009.
However, on May 19th, just several weeks before the event, the game was leaked by the website
Playstation Lifestyle.
They published a target render video that showed the boy and the big cat-like creature.
It also revealed the working title for the game “Project Trico”.
The same video was officially released during E3 but this time, with improved graphics.
As an extra treat the game was also given its official title “The Last Guardian”.
The Japanese name however was “Hito Kui no Oowashi Toriko”, which roughly translates
to “The Giant Man-Eating Eagle Toriko”.
A year later the game was showed off again at the Tokyo Game Show in 2010.
A new trailer was presented which slated the game for a holiday 2011 release.
Team Ico seemed confident about hitting this target since they even showed a demo to members
of the press in March 2011.
However, it was around this time that more and more problems started to arise behind
the scenes.
Sony’s head of game development, Shuhei Yoshida explains after being asked about developing
the game on PS3:
“And simply, we failed!
We decided, no, we cannot make it.
The trailer that we showed at E3 2009 was speeded up.
It was from the development system but we took it frame by frame and made it run smoothly.
It was clear that the team had to make a compromise in terms of features.”
By April, the team had to officially delay the game, pushing it to a 2012 release.
The worst piece of news that year was still to come, unfortunately.
In December of 2011, both the executive producer Yoshifusa Hayama and director Fumito Ueda
left Sony.
Yoshifusa went on to work as a creative director at another studio, thereby abandoning the
project entirely.
This raised many concerns, even after Sony told the press that Ueda was still committed
to finish the game in a freelance capacity and that he was contractually obligated to
do so.
It wasn’t immediately explained why he left Sony but a year later, Mr. Fumito said in
an interview that he felt a sense of crisis within himself about a lot of things, prompting
him to cut ties with the Japanese company.
Trico was nowhere to be seen in 2012 but there was no shortage of rumors.
Among them were reports that the game lost its trademark, making it seem like Sony had
abandoned the project entirely.
Jack Tretton, former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, seemingly confirmed that development
was put on hold.
These claims were later denied by Sony, followed by a statement saying that the game is still
making progress.
In August however, one piece of news was confirmed, namely that the producer for Ico and Shadow
of the Colossus Kenji Kaido had left Playstation after 15 years.
Although it wasn’t clear if he was ever involved with The Last Guardian, it still
wasn’t a good sign.
Aside from all the speculation that year, major decisions were being made behind the
scenes, resulting in shifting console development to PS4, much to Fumito’s disappointment.
In an interview from 2016 with IGN he states:
“When it was decided that the game would be transitioned to PS4 it was difficult for
me to accept.
Now that I look back at it, the PS3 market has become smaller at this point and now I
think the PS4 market is the main market so I am happy to have this title as a PS4 exclusive
title but when the decision was first made I had some difficulty and I felt a little
disappointed because I wanted to release this game earlier.”
Switching from PS3 to PS4 was a necessary decision to keep Ueda’s original vision
alive according to Yoshida:
“So, Ueda-san, his style of development is very set out, clear, like a vision, at
the beginning of the project.
Because he is an artist, he creates a short video to show to the team members, this is
what we make.
So the vision is totally the same.
Because of the technical difficulty, running the game at the frame-rate required that the
team look to compromise some features - the number of characters that Ueda-san wanted
to do - if we were to continue on PS3.
But, because we moved to PS4, now he can make what he wanted.
So people say it looks like the same game - there's a reason!”
Ueda seemed to contradict this statement, explaining that he thinks that if the game
had come out on PS3, it would have been a good product nonetheless.
The PlayStation 3 wasn’t restricting him in any way and he even went as far as saying
that the PlayStation 3 version of Trico might have had more movements and animation than
the PS4 version.
Two whole years went by and it was during this time that Team Ico was hard at work,
porting the game to PS4.
From 2012 until 2014, no new info about the development was released to the public and
people slowly started to lose hope that it was ever going to see the light of day.
There were claims that even Mark Cerny - veteran game designer and lead architect of the PS4
- was brought in to save the game.
Yoshida later said that these claims were false, stating that Mark was merely a consultant
for many of Sony’s first party teams, including The Last Guardian team, and that he only gave
technical advice during development.
This resulted in one of the main reasons why the game was delayed for such a long period.
It took a lot of time and effort to rebuild the fundamentals of the game engine and making
sure the game ran as smoothly as possible on the new hardware.
While technical advancements were being made, little to none of the creative aspects could
continue to progress during this time.
In the summer of 2014, another important figure at Sony left the company.
Jinji Horagai, the lead programmer of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, decided to team
up with Ueda and form a new studio called genDESIGN.
From then on, they and a couple of other former Team Ico members were in charge of the art
direction, game design and animations.
The implementation and the testing was still the responsibility of Japan Studio, but this
change gave director Ueda the much needed room to focus on all the creative aspects.
Although this might have seemed harmful for its development from the outside, Ueda said
that it turned out to be beneficial for the project:
“Initially I was worried about whether this kind of structure would work out, but when
I look back at it now I think it’s gone very well.
The way we have it right now is very easy for me to work and if there’s an opportunity
in the future where I can do it in a similar way, I would definitely want to.”
The public re-reveal happened at E3 in 2015 where Sony finally confirmed The Last Guardian
was now a PS4 exclusive title.
Furthermore, Sony also announced the game was now scheduled to be released in 2016.
Gamers had to wait another full year before the official release date was announced at
the next E3.
By then, the game was fully complete according to Ueda.
The only work that remained was fine-tuning the visuals and cutscenes.
The 26th October 2016 looked like it would be the day the public would finally get their
hands on the third installment of Team Ico.
But just when it seemed the wait was finally over, another delay was announced in September,
pushing the release date to early December.
Yoshida told the press that the developers needed more time to work out bugs that had
sprung up during the final production of the game.
On October 21st, The Last Guardian was submitted for manufacturing.
It took years and years of hard work and perseverance but Ueda and his team had survived development
hell and were able to finally share the fruit of their hard work with the rest of the world
on the 6th of December 2016.
During the making of this video, it’s been three years since the launch of The Last Guardian,
but the story of its entire development is still incomplete.
During interviews, Ueda was intentionally vague about the reason why he left Sony and
why everything was prolonged for so long.
In an interview from 2015, he called the delays a “corporate decision by Sony” but didn’t
specify what caused the decision to be made.
He did mention in an interview with IGN that it would be nice to talk about the struggles
he and his team has been through but that it was too early to talk about.
In the end, Ueda was just grateful to get The Last Guardian out there to the fans, to
the people that motivated him and kept reminding him that they were still looking forward to
its release.
When asked what’s next in store for him he said the following:
“In between the ups and downs of game development, I've spun up a few concepts.
They're kind of on the backburner right now, obviously, because The Last Guardian is the
main focus.
Once we get this out, maybe I will be able to explore those ideas a little bit further.”
So perhaps the lengthy development sparked a few new ideas in Ueda that otherwise would
never have happened.
One of those new ideas might already be well into development.
In 2018 Ueda posted a Happy New Year message on the genDESIGN website and accompanied the
post with an image that had the title “Beauty and the Beast 2018” in the website’s source
code.
Ueda has stated in the past that part of his game development process is to create an image
that represents his vision for the project.
Something he can show to people to communicate his ideas and goals.
He didn't want to share too much information when asked about the image and his next project
but he did elaborate:
“About the new project, I can't say many things but until now the priority for me is
visual image.
Now I change the process a little bit so I intend to make a prototype because there are
many tools to facilitate making one."
Fast forward almost 2 years and genDESIGN shared that it’s finishing up production
on the prototype for their next game:
“The extensive prototyping period was worthwhile and we are making very good progress.
I believe this project will showcase both unexpected and familiar elements in one.”
They’re actively looking for a publisher at the time of making this video and hopefully
this time around, Ueda doesn’t have to go through too many struggles and can just do
what he loves most; share his creativity with passionate gamers around the world.