Interview
Outside the shadows
Talking with the makers of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus

Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido sit down and talk about making their two games at DICE Summit 2006.

Chairman: What were your roles when developing Shadow of the Colossus?

Fumito Ueda: I was Director, Art Director and Lead Game Designer.

Kenji Kaido: I was Producer; in charge of team management and making sure that Ueda's ideas made it into the game.

Chairman: It seems Mr. Ueda did a lot of jobs himself!

FU: I guess so. I would have gladly worked less but everyone was pretty busy with their job!

Chairman: How many members were on the team during development, then?

KK: For ICO we had approximately twenty people working on the game at a time. For Shadow of the Colossus I'd say we were thirty five or so during our peak.

Chairman: That's not a lot of people working on a game.

KK: When we started creating Shadow of the Colossus we published a job advert to recruit more staff. There were about five hundred applications if I remember correctly. We employed ten of them but only one or two were of the standard Ueda was looking for. He ended up repeating what he did during ICO, taking up various roles himself. I guess if we had another Ueda we would have released the game in two years instead of four! (laughs)

Chairman: How did you manage to keep motivation high during the whole development process?

KK: It is not always possible to keep motivation high during such a long time. What we did was to hold regular presentations among the staff. This helped everyone keep focused on the task at hand. Sometimes difficulties are hard to avoid though. For example, when Ueda asked for major changes, that led to drops in motivation. But then, after doing what was needed everyone would be pretty satisfied with the end result and morale would be regained.

Chairman: Did you change the way you create games in between ICO and Shadow of the Colossus?

FU: I have some experience with CG animation so what I do at the very beginning is to come up with a video demonstration of what the game is about. It worked very well with ICO in 1997.

KK: He worked on a short clip which took him about four months to make. For Shadow of the Colossus we did the same thing and it worked out well again.

[ At this point, the concept video for Shadow of the Colossus, NICO (Second ICO or Next ICO) is shown. Horsemen chase and bring down a huge bull-like colossus. ]

KK: The concept video and final product are very similar, although as you can see the proper game looks much more polished.

Chairman: The main character has changed a lot from that video to the one in the game. For one thing he has no horns.

FU: I didn't put much thought into the characters at that stage. Actually I used the same engine we created for ICO to make the video so the characters look very alike. Horns in ICO were used to differentiate the protagonist from his enemies.

Chairman: Your games feel and play very different from anything else on the market.

FU: In the case of ICO, I wanted to create a different kind of game. Our team was not very experienced at the time and so we had to make up for that by creating something new. If we don't challenge ourselves every time we make a game, we will lose our market.

Chairman: Did you come to difficulties, technically?

KK: To make character movement look and behave naturally we had to use something called "motion blending." For example, by blending the running and turning animations of the horse into each other, we were able to recreate natural movement. And don't forget that since the colossi are huge, any mistake or strangeness in their animation would look totally out of place. We came up with a method to control even the most minute of animations.

FU: To make everything look natural we had to single out every little animation that looked wrong. It was a very long process to go through.

Chairman: The only enemies in Shadow of the Colossus are the colossi. This is what sets the game apart from others, isn't it?

FU: It is one thing that makes it different, yes. But the true reason for that decision was that for the staff to focus and put all their effort in creating the colossi we had to cut out smaller enemies. If I was playing, I'd want to go from one enemy to the other as quickly as possible and I guess most other players feel the same.

Chairman: Any ideas for a sequel?

FU: I do not really like the idea of sequels. I want to try many new things. That is what I feel I have to do next.

Chairman: So, what about your next effort?

FU: Proper work hasn't started yet but we do have several ideas we're pondering about.

After the interview, Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido met with the audience who asked questions... and for autographs.

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