Team ICO Gamers Blog

1. Fumito Ueda decided Yorda should have a haircut the day the master was due;

2. The Shadow of the Colossus team went horse riding to get Agro's animations right;

3. Fumito Ueda visited the Grand Canyon to research Shadow of the Colossus;

4. Originally ICO was meant to be released on PSone because then the PS2 didn't have many good games;

5. The concept for ICO was inspired by a Japanese TV commercial with a lady holding the hand of a child, walking through the woods;

6. Yorda should have been with horns;

7. She was going to have runes on her arm too;

8. The story for ICO was going to be very different. Yorda was a princess trapped in a cell and Ico, a slave helping in the castle. He found the cell and helped her escape;

9. Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair was used as background music in the original ICO pilot movie. This CG clip was used to pitch the game to Sony;

10. The song also became the inspiration for ICO's theme song, "You Were There";

11. "You Were There" was sung by a boy, Steven Geraghty;

12. Members on the team used to wonder why they were working on Yorda's strange movements (strolling around, following birds) because they didn't affect gameplay in any way;

13. Fumito Ueda wanted these because according to him "we are all attracted by the quirks of girlfriends";

14. Many more of these "quirks" were planned but time was an issue so they were cut;

15. Fumito Ueda had never been to a castle prior to working on ICO so he based the Queen's castle in the game on the work of artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi;

16. Deserted vehicles near rice fields and semi-built up areas in the Japanese countryside were some of the things which at first inspired ICO's castle;

17. The team intentionally avoided using the maximum graphic specs of the PS2 in order to give ICO something different and make it stand out;

18. Fumito Ueda started working on Shadow of the Colossus even before his first game was released in Europe in 2002;

19. Shadow of the Colossus was first called NICO, a pun on Japanese word "Ni" meaning "Two";

20. ICO is also pun on Japanese expressions meaning "Let's go";

21. The team was considering calling Shadow of the Colossus "Dragon Hearts" and "Dragon Peace" before the story was even planned;

22. Fumito Ueda's own interpretation of ICO's ending is that Ico is dreaming of meeting Yorda once again. The second water melon ending is another dream Ico has;

23. His interpretation of the ending in Shadow of the Colossus, on the other hand is that Wander sires the line of horned children;

24. Ico was given horns because it was not easy to make a distinction between the two characters and their enemies from a distance;

25. The Japanese name of Shadow of the Colossus, "Wander to Kyozo" doesn't refer to the main character's name. It was used to show what the game is about - to wander around and giants;

26. In ICO's two-player mode, Yorda can carry bombs;

27. She can also swim, if prompted to. To do this the player has to use bombs to drop her into water;

28. Amusingly, Fumito Ueda was so modest, he failed to have an English acceptance speech ready at the Game Developer Choice Awards 2006, clearly not expecting the game to win the "Game of the Year" award;

29. Yorda is 16 years old, and Ico is 12;

30. Shadow of the Colossus was featured in the movie "Reign Over Me". The reason for choosing it, according to the film's author was that "You could see where someone who was dealing with 9/11 would be engrossed by a giant that keeps collapsing over and over again";

31. Fumito Ueda decided to try for a video game career when he thought "how wonderful it might be to be someone who touches others through his creations." He did this after spending time living off as an artist;

32. He filled 11 roles in the development of his first game, ICO;

33. One of them was to design the logo and draw the box-art himself;

34. He also single-handedly created the pilot movie in three months using Lightwave 3D, which he taught himself;

35. When the team published an advert on Weekly Famitsu looking for staff to work on Shadow of the Colossus, some 500 applications were received;

36. Kenji Kaido said only 10 people made it to team;

37. But only 1 of them satisfied Ueda's standards of quality;

38. All of the animations in Shadow of the Colossus were hand-drawn;

39. Someone from the team mysteriously added an early model of Mono in a scarecrow pose in the door to the secret garden in the demo. It's mostly strange because in that build, the garden was only reachable by using a jumping glitch;

40. More than 24 colossi were designed for Shadow of the Colossus. Some were cut because of time and design issues;

41. A squirrel was added to the ending of Shadow of the Colossus in PAL territories. It was also added in the Japanese 'PlayStation the Best' edition;

42. There were some tracks which were composed for Shadow of the Colossus but never made it in the game. They can be found in the original soundtrack CD;

43. The bridge in Shadow of the Colossus spans through half the game world, making it the largest bridge in any game yet;

44. In ICO, the caskets in which horned children are imprisoned have little slits. They're not for the children to look outside considering they would be facing the opposite way;

45. Ico's language is a deformed version of Japanese, intended to sound familiar to Japanese players;

46. Yorda's runic language is written by switching backwards Japanese Romaji with glyphs, and spoken backwards Japanese;

47. The language in Shadow of the Colossus is the same as the one Ico uses but it's been more deformed by adding in Romanisation and Latin dialect to make it sound more ancient;

48. Wander's shadow, when being sucked in the pool in the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, can still whistle for Agro;

49. The child in the ending is controllable. You can press any of the face buttons to make him wiggle around and cry;

50. Fumito Ueda's job application letter to Sony included a picture of a cat. One of his best portfolio presentations was also about a cat and called "Tyrant Kitty." The drawing showed unwary art gallery patrons peering into what seemed to be an empty cage before being sprayed with dirt, supposedly kicked up by an imaginary subterranean cat.