Fumito Ueda and I discuss a large robot head
An interview with the lead designer of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian about his new game, its unexpected guns, its colossal cranium, and not hurrying up
On a recent sunny day in Los Angeles, I stood next to the great video game designer Fumito Ueda as we pondered the massive metal robot head before us.
Ueda is best known for leading the teams behind the quiet, majestic PlayStation action-adventure games Ico (2001; about a young man and woman climbing over ruins), Shadow of the Colossus (2005; about a young man climbing giants and killing them) and The Last Guardian (2016; about a young man bonding with a giant feathered beast).
He had come to L.A. to promote his next game, the mysterious Gen Atlas.
He’d shown a trailer two days earlier at Summer Game Fest. In it, a cloaked person (or were they a humanoid robot?) climbs onto a giant robot head, somehow flies it, and connects it to a massive robot bod. The trailer also showed some shooting—a first for an Ueda-directed game—a rocket launch, and a big robot that was lifting and rotating one end of a train-sized structure.
The trailer ended with a shot of our hero-character standing atop the big robot head. A replica of that head had been erected in L.A., near some tents set up by Ueda’s new publisher, Epic Games.
After an interview in one of Epic’s tents, we walked outside and stood to the left of the big robot face. I thought it might spark some insights.
Ueda explained that he had designed the robot many years ago, “pretty much from the beginning” while conceiving the new game. He explained this through a translator, who stood near us and converted his Japanese remarks into English.
“Maybe this is kind of saying it in a Japanese … way that the direction that I took with the robot design is that it wouldn’t be a hero robot, but it actually wouldn’t also be the opposite, where it’s, like, completely falling apart. We’re kind of staying in the center, like a neutral zone of that.”
He directed my attention to some flaps on the side of the statue.
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