Level Atlas

Rank 09

Fumito Uedadraft

Director of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. Ueda designs by removing: no HUD, no filler, one relationship carried in the controls. His games are short, sparse, and among the most cited in the field.

Born
1970
Nationality
Japanese
Active
1995 to present
Studios
Warp, Sony Japan Studio (Team Ico), genDESIGN
“ICO is a game with no tutorial, no gauges. In many senses, it is a game defined by what is not there.”

Why it matters

Ueda is here for a method and for a lineage. Design by subtraction gave designers permission to cut what a genre expects, and the games he made that way are the ones later designers point to when they say games can carry feeling. Miyazaki left a career at Oracle after playing Ico. That is influence you can date.

Lessons

  1. 01 · process

    Design by subtraction

    Ico has no HUD, almost no enemies, no shops, and one puzzle verb. Ueda's method is to name the feeling the game is for and remove everything that does not serve it, even the things a genre expects. Shadow of the Colossus removes the entire dungeon between bosses. The lesson is that every feature costs attention, and attention is what the feeling is made of.

  2. 02 · narrative

    Put the relationship in the controls

    In Ico the player holds Yorda's hand with a button and lets go to climb. Ueda says the hand-hold was added deliberately, as motivation: a player would want to rescue and protect her. What it produced was attachment built from the input scheme rather than from a cutscene, and The Last Guardian repeats the trick with a creature that does not always obey. The lesson is that a relationship can live in the controls.

  3. 03 · space

    The boss is the level

    Each colossus is a climbing puzzle you can see from across a field, approached over open ground with nothing between you and it. The creature is the architecture, the weak point is the destination, and the empty plain is the pacing. It is the weenie principle with the monument made hostile, and a rare case of a game whose sixteen levels are all bosses.

Known for

  • Ico2001 · director
  • Shadow of the Colossus2005 · director
  • The Last Guardian2016 · director

Levels in the atlas (0)

Derived from level entries, not maintained here.

No level entries credit this designer yet.

Lineage

Cited as an influence by: Hidetaka Miyazaki(derived)

Sources