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.
