Interview
They might be giants
Interview with Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido

Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido were the creators of ICO before moving onto Shadow of the Colossus, the game that’s taken up the last four years of their lives. Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK cornered them for a chat about art, arty games and killing massive monsters.

Official PlayStation 2 Magazine: Tell us a bit about your philosophy of game design.

Kenji Kaido: As the producer, my main role is to look around and figure out what nobody else is doing, and always be doing something new and challenging; something different in the market. I think the real value of games like ours is how different they are, and that they can give inspiration and help create new directions in the industry by doing something different. My role is to support the creative team and make sure that happens.

Fumito Ueda: My philosophy is more fuzzy. I think that you can break games down into two large categories; ones that you play just to kill time, and ones that you can’t wait for and you’ll line up at the store to buy. I want to make the second type. On a higher level, I think that games have the power to have a good influence on people, and I want to make games that have a positive impact on the way people feel and think.

OPS2: We’ve noticed that the colossi give you hints when you’re stuck. Is it important for you to create a game that anyone can finish so they can enjoy the whole experience?

FU: That’s a question I struggle with myself a lot; whether games should be a discreet experience. In that respect, I don’t think that action has to be about overcoming a single barrier or difficulty in the course of a story. It can be a lot more than that and action can be incorporated to change the emotional direction of the game. In that sense, the interactive aspect of games is what helps to distinguish them from books and movies.

OPS2: What other games do you think are good examples of that?

FU: In Half-Life there’s a scene where you’re riding a coach, and it’s not an action scene, but it contains the same sort of ability to change your emotions.

OPS2: How do you feel about the PS3’s graphical capabilities? Are you worried that it’ll cause too much focus on realistic graphics?

FU: That’s a difficult question. Looking at the games presented at the Tokyo Games Show (2005), a lot of them have very high quality, hyper realistic graphics, and we could do the same thing, but we’d leave ourselves with no differentiation between our work and that of the other developers. Also, the games that have the highest quality graphics tend to sacrifice character or object movement for that.

OPS2: Have you tried to make Shadow of the Colossus more conventional that ICO?

KK: I believe, in the Western market in particular, you need to build characters that the player can identify with - truly fantastical characters don’t go over well. That isn’t the reason the character’s an average kid, we just came up with a character appropriate for the story.

OPS2: Are you worried that games like Shadow of the Colossus will have trouble getting published as the cost of making games goes up?

FU: That’s a question being asked throughout the industry. If you look at games developed a long time ago, it was a question of people saying ‘Hey, we’ve got this technology, let’s see what we can do with it’ and it was creative driven. Now it’s about saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this technology, now we have to use it.’ We think the game design should determine the technology you use, not the other way around. But from the publisher’s point of view, we think that completely marketing-driven games are not always attractive or successful, so publishers need games like this that change people’s views or give people inspiration to be seen as a success in the market.

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In-house content © 2008 Team ICO® Games Magazine UK.
ICO® & Shadow of the Colossus™ © 2008 Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.