Interview with Fumito Ueda

[Slartibartfast]

You know, the guy behind Shadow Of The Colossus and Ico:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70286-0.html?tw=wn_index_14

Fumito Ueda, the director of Shadow of the Colossus, is one of the game industry's artistic geniuses.

With a background in fine art and painting, Ueda was the creative force behind Sony's critically acclaimed Ico, which was a particular hit with women for its romantic tone and soft visuals.

One of Ueda's signatures is dispensing with game chestnuts like meters and levels, instead showing players' progress by personifying the information in the characters' personality or movement. In Shadow of the Colossus, for instance, the scale of the massive beasts that must be slayed shows the "level" reached by the player.

A measure of the man's stature in the industry is that even designers with major game credits of their own want to get near him to express their appreciation for his work. Wired News recently interviewed Ueda, as games producer and industry veteran Kenji Kaido sat in. But Ueda answered all the questions -- the games, as everyone knows, are Ueda's babies.

Wired News: Is there any connection between the worlds of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus?

Fumito Ueda: There's no specific connection as far as a timeline. But, both games exist in the same world.

WN: But you've said the baby we see at the end of Colossus is the first "baby born with horns" referred to in the backstory of Ico.

FU: Yes. I wanted to give some idea to the player, after you complete the game, that there was a connection to Ico. That's why I put in the baby with the horns. If somebody goes all the way through the game, I wanted them to be rewarded.

WN: Have you worked out the timeline of this world for yourself? What happens between the two games?

FU: In the beginning, I didn't have a complete picture of the storyline. But I did know what I wanted the game design to be. I try to match the game design with the storyline, so the story followed from the mechanics. (At an industry conference recently, Ueda was asked why Ico, the main character of the first game, had horns on his head. The designer said that in early play tests it was difficult to tell which character you were controlling, so they put horns on his head. Only after that did it become part of the game's story.)

WN: In 2002, before anything about Colossus was revealed, you were asked about your next project. You said while Ico was one big challenge, your next game would be many small challenges. What did you mean by that?

FU: The big challenge of Ico was that it was my first game, and I was inexperienced. And so was the team; they didn't have the experience necessary to create this kind of unique title. It isn't a video game -- a conventional video game has things like a life meter or other icons on the screen. Ico doesn't have these things.

So, after finishing Ico, I thought we would have a lot of even better ideas for the next project -- those were the "small challenges." But looking back, I don't think they were small.... The team knew what they were doing at that point, and thought they could easily overcome any challenge.

WN: When you say Ico isn't a video game, it makes me think of the animator Hayao Miyazaki, who stresses that his work is not anime. It's as if he wants to distance himself from the connotations of that word.

FU: Yes, he always says that his films aren't anime, they're manga movies. But I think it's different -- I think Miyazaki is shy, and he'll never praise his own work. That's why he says that. But for Ico, at the beginning of the development period, I thought that the games industry had a negative image for many people. If I called my work a video game, people would think, "Well, this is just a video game, so I don't want to play it."

WN: Colossus, though, had many of those traditional video-game elements added back in: strength gauges, life meters. So would you say Colossus is a video game?

FU: When we said ... Ico is not a conventional video game title, we set limitations on ourselves for the development of the game. We had to eliminate everything that made it look like a video game. But for our next game, we wanted to remove those artificial limitations that we placed on ourselves. We wanted to just make a game that was fun. If a limitation made the game less fun, we weren't going to restrict ourselves. And yet, while we were developing Colossus, it became similar to the Ico style. We don't know why.

WN: You've said you thought about having smaller enemies in the game, not just the 16 colossi, but you took them out because it would be too similar to other video games.

FU: We thought if there were a lot of small enemies that a lot of players would actually appreciate that. But I wanted the team's focus to be on the colossi. If we added other elements, the team would have to put their efforts into those elements, and the quality of the boss characters would go down.

I really like boss fights in video games, and I wanted to create high-quality ones. When I start playing a game, I want to get to the boss fights quickly. Fighting a boss is a really fun element in games, and I wanted to have a lot of that.

WN: What about the final game do you not like?

FU: There are a lot of things, but I don't want to talk about them. It's too soon.

WN: What's next for the team?

FU: (Ueda hands the question to Kaido.) Yeah, what are we going to do?

KK: I couldn't tell you. Fumito has a couple of ideas, but we don't even know what the platform is going to be. I want to create a game that takes full advantage of the format it's on. If we made a PS3 or PSP game, we want it to take special advantage of the abilities of that format.

Interesting that he mentions the PSP...I may have to get one after all

 

[K600]

Wow...I didn't realize it before, but Ico was his first game? That's one Hell of a way to start.

 

[Slartibartfast]

I have both Ico and SotC, but have only really played Shadow so far. It's a really fascinating game: I love the art style and the story, but I find the actual gameplay frustrating. So I'll sit down to play and for a while will be like, "wow what a great game" but before long I'm yelling at the stupid camera, or getting frustrated by the fact that I climbed all the way up the Colossus, only to have it flail around, not allowing me to stab it, until I lose all my stamina. I've played Ico up to the first save point, and it seems intriguing, but I can tell already I'm going to have a similar reaction. I just do not get along well with 3D, third person games. But, I'm going to force myself to play through Ico, and probably a little more of Shadow (have beaten the game once, and am about halfway done with the time attacks on normal).

What I find really interesting about the interview is that he doesn't have a programming/game background. I've read more than once that the best way to be a designer is to not play very many games at all, because otherwise you just end-up recreating your favorites.