Shadow of the Colossus

• 1. Introduction

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  In Shadow of the Colossus, a young man named Wander lifts his sword into the sunlight, and the blade throws beams of light across the land. The beams converge when the sword points toward the next giant. Sony Computer Entertainment released this action-adventure game for the PlayStation 2 in 2005. It sends Wander into an abandoned, forbidden region to hunt enormous beings, because he hopes that killing them will bring a girl named Mono back to life.

  Behind the game stood director Fumito Ueda and a studio known as Team Ico, which had already won praise for Ico. Their second project raises several questions. Why did a team spend years on one game and then rebuild it as another? How do you make a creature the size of a building feel alive on aging hardware? Why did the director want victory to feel conflicted? And what happens to a man who gets exactly what he asked for?

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• 2. From NICO To Colossus

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  Directly after the December 2001 Japanese release of Ico, Fumito Ueda went looking through old ideas he had never been able to build. He picked the one closest to his own tastes as a player. Ueda had grown up wanting to make a game like The Legend of Zelda, and he described his giant bosses as inverted Zelda dungeons.

  Titles such as Grand Theft Auto III shaped the mood he wanted. Ueda saw cruelty as a means of expression in games like that, and he meant to use the same motif. In talks with producer Kenji Kaido, he noted how many games make players shoot huge bosses from far away. Ueda believed those fights would be simpler if the hero could climb the enemy and strike up close. His childhood fascination with monster movies supplied the scale.

  A direct sequel to Ico was on the table and was turned down. Some staff argued that Ico was self-contained, and they doubted anyone was asking for another one. There was also a practical worry. The team assumed a single-player game like Ico required elaborate puzzles, and they wanted to avoid building them. They chose a standalone project called NICO, which joined ni, the Japanese word for two, with Ico. It was planned as an online multiplayer game that would not need complex level design.

  A second game was weighed alongside Ueda's idea, and it was meant to appeal more to a female audience. It had no working title, used no 3D graphics, and was eventually scrapped. Ueda's concept moved ahead. He later described the finished game as being, in many ways, one for boys and men.

  In January 2002 the team drafted a storyboard for a concept film, and by May the short was finished. A small group made it: Ueda, one of Ico's designers and an animation team of roughly ten people. It showed three masked, horned boys riding across a vast landscape to attack a towering being that resembled the second colossus in the final game. The film ran in the Ico engine and was rendered in real time on the PlayStation 2, so the team could judge what the hardware allowed.

  Kaido said the team treated that film as a reference point for the whole project. The themes of fighting a giant enemy and exploring a giant field survived into the final design. One mechanic did not. In the film, an attacker who had killed a giant leaped from its corpse onto his approaching horse. The film later played at trade shows, including the 2006 D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, where Kaido and Ueda discussed the development with Lorne Lanning.

  June 2002 brought a prototype, and with it a technical challenge from Kaido called organic collision deformation. If a giant's limb was horizontal, he expected the player to run along it as though it were flat ground. Ueda and the programmers needed over six months to make it work. They began by letting a character climb a pole-like object, and they put a priority on simulating scenes of being shaken off or narrowly avoiding a stomp.

  In May 2003 a demonstration build of NICO was shown at a production meeting, and full development was approved that same month. The technology demo then toured Sony's foreign offices among prospective PlayStation 2 titles, and viewers were excited. Secrecy failed when images of its horse-riding characters leaked onto the Internet, and fans guessed they were looking at an Ico sequel. Ueda insisted the games were unrelated, though he admitted reusing Ico character designs to save time and money on the film.

  Then came the reversal. After weighing how few people worked on NICO and what skills they had, the team concluded they were not qualified to deliver an online-only game. They reshaped the project as a single-player title, discarded the Ico tools, and wrote a dedicated engine. Almost everything was built from the ground up again. Contemporary and retrospective sources would call the result both a spiritual successor and a prequel to Ico.

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• 3. Giants That React

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  Hanging from a colossus's fur, Wander swings like a pendulum while the creature thrashes to throw him off. That motion comes from a blend of hand animation, simulated physics and inverse kinematics, a method borrowed from robotics. Animators drew the basic movements by hand. The physics engine simulated the physical interactions in real time, and the results fed a system that positioned the joints and, by extension, the whole body. A few characters were animated procedurally, but only sparingly, because the PlayStation 2 had limited computing power.

  The simulation also changes how Wander reacts to a fall from a moving colossus, depending on how far his body travels before landing. Ueda said that seeing this effect convinced him the project offered an exceptional play experience. The same technology lets the horse adjust her posture on uneven ground, and it extends to the colossi too.

  Each colossus has at least one weak point, marked by a glowing sigil that the sword's reflected light can reveal. Wander grips fur or ledges to climb, but a stamina gauge drains while he holds on. Eating the tail of a certain kind of lizard raises that gauge, and fruit raises his maximum health. The colossi are the only enemies in the game. The first two battles take place on flat, open ground, and most of the later fourteen force the player to use the surroundings.

  Sensor areas set across each colossus's territory trigger its reactions. If the player approaches an armed colossus from the front at ground level, the creature raises its weapon. Because this was not a hard-coded program, the artificial intelligence could be tuned scene by scene. Character designer Shinpei Suzuki recalled that the team made progress through trial and error. Kaido said the choreography of some colossus movements failed to meet expectations, so the team reworked the programming that animated them.

  Wander's horse, Agro, received movement algorithms of her own, meant to echo a real horse. She may ignore a command and act on her own to avoid a visible danger. Ueda admitted the team had to find a balance, since too much disobedience would sacrifice playability for realism. Deep water and tall obstacles stop her entirely, so some battles must be fought without her. Based partly on Ueda's own experience with horseriding, the team prepared a detailed set of maneuvers Wander could perform in concert with her.

  Kaido was especially satisfied with how Agro turned out. The interplay between horse and rider inspired Ueda to build his following game, The Last Guardian, around a similar relationship.

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• 4. Forty-Eight Become Sixteen

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  Ueda's first plan for NICO called for 48 colossi. He cut that to 24 when he concluded his vision could not be realized, and he finally settled on the 16 of the released game. His worry was that keeping the larger number would drag the quality below what he wanted. To choose which giants to drop, Team Ico compared how finished each one was and how much its planned defeat resembled a strategy reserved for another enemy.

  Other ideas fell away too. A two-player mode was cut for lack of development time. A full day cycle and weather changes were removed because of problems Ueda attributed to the PlayStation 2's memory. The team also considered fights with smaller enemies and optional colossi that players need not defeat, but Ueda believed they would add no play value. Human non-player characters were left out entirely, although Ueda asked for small animals to be hidden around the land. Physics complexity meant the faster colossi had to be smaller.

  Production began in September 2003 after a long preparation phase. Sony Computer Entertainment gave the project more time, more funding and more creative freedom than Ico had received, a measure of respect for that game's critical success. The team advertised for artists in Japanese trade media and by word of mouth. Of five hundred applicants, ten were hired, but Ueda felt only one or two met his standards.

  The work was punishing. Fans expected the team to surpass Ico, and Ueda's perfectionism strained morale because he often demanded revisions. Both he and Kaido said his insistence on personally supervising the art direction added to the delays. Thomas Wilborgh of the Swedish gaming magazine LEVEL later argued that this hands-on role showed how well Ueda knew every part of his games. At the height of production, Ueda stayed in the office after hours, and Kaido refused to leave early when other staff worked overtime.

  Kaido admitted the team missed deadlines and exceeded its budget more than once, and that the PlayStation 2 could not support some of their ambitions. Still, he credited the staff's dedication for sticking to the schedule in the end. Ueda said the game ultimately involved a team of 40 people. After three and a half years of development, they finished the Japanese and North American versions in September 2005.

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• 5. Light, Stone, And Silence

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  Ueda traveled to the Grand Canyon and Death Valley to find inspiration for the game's landscape. He wanted the presentation to have what he called the density of a painting. He planned the visuals in 3D software rather than on paper, because converting hand-drawn art into polygons would strip away detail. Environmental designer Kouji Hasegawa described the process as a repeating cycle of creating, testing and tuning. The scenery was reworked drastically several times, because Ueda kept pushing for lighter tones and for more brightness and saturation in the textures.

  The finished engine pairs desaturated colors with motion blur, partial high dynamic range rendering and heavy bloom lighting. Grayish and light tones together produced an atmosphere Ueda called firm-feeling. The sword-light search mechanic came from the same instinct. He wanted a straightforward, visually defined way for players to know where to go.

  Ueda also wanted each victory to leave the player conflicted. To test the idea, he edited a colossus's death scene together with a melancholic song from a film soundtrack. When he showed it to the staff, they laughed, because such a scene looked like a mistake to them. He kept the idea for every battle after asking players what they thought, and he judged it a sound decision.

  The score belongs to Kow Otani, who had written music for the 1990s Gamera films and a number of anime. His earlier game credits were the PlayStation 2 flight simulator Sky Odyssey and the PlayStation scrolling shooter Philosoma. Ueda wanted a different approach from the Ico score by Michiru Oshima, and he saw this game as appealing more to male players, so he hired a male composer. Otani's range and his knowledge of folk instruments also counted in his favor.

  Ueda's core idea was a dynamic and gallant score in the manner of traditional Hollywood film music, with a melancholic mood inspired by the opening theme of Silent Hill. The team also wanted restraint in emotional expression. Music plays mostly during colossus encounters. Elsewhere the land is underscored by water and wind, which deepens the loneliness of its empty spaces. Otani was repeatedly asked to rewrite pieces so they would fit the game's technical limits.

  An album titled Wanda and the Colossus Original Soundtrack: Roar of the Earth appeared only in Japan, on the 7th of December 2005. Ueda singled out the finale, a new recording that Otani assembled from phrases taken from every other track. Parts of it puzzled him at first, but he came to think it was a really cool way to use the game's music.

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• 6. The Forbidden Land

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  A stone bridge spanning half the width of a peninsula is the only way into the Forbidden Land. It begins at a small cleft in the northern mountains and ends at a temple called the Shrine of Worship, at the center of the region. Mountains close off the north, and sea lies to the south and east. Lakes, plateaus, canyons, caves and deserts fill the land, along with ruins that suggest a settlement once stood here. The narrative is minimalist and gives almost no backstory for anyone in it.

  Of Mono, the only established fact is that she was a maiden sacrificed because people believed her destiny was cursed. Dormin, the entity Wander hopes will revive her, speaks with two voices at once, one male and one female. One commentator speculated that the name, spelled backwards, gives Nimrod, a reference to the biblical king whose body was cut up and scattered. The shaman Lord Emon narrates a vision in the introduction and pursues Wander with a small group of warriors, hoping to stop what he calls the forbidden spell. The English version calls Agro a male steed, although Ueda saw the horse as female.

  The colossi are armored giants with forms ranging from humanoids to predatory animals, and they live underwater, on land and in the air. Their bodies fuse organic parts with rock, earth and architectural elements, some of them weathered or fractured. Some are peaceful until provoked, while others attack on sight, and none leaves its own territory. A slain colossus remains as a mound of earth and rock, and a pillar of light marks the spot. Their Latin names circulate among fans but are not official and never appear in the game.

  Wander arrives carrying Mono's body to an altar, and humanoid shadow creatures drift toward him before he dismisses them with the Ancient Sword. Dormin is surprised that he holds that weapon. In exchange for Mono's soul, it asks him to destroy the sixteen idols lining the temple hall by slaying their physical forms, the colossi. Dormin warns of a great price. What Wander does not know is that the colossi hold portions of Dormin's own essence, scattered long ago to leave the entity powerless.

  With each kill, a fragment of that essence enters Wander's body. His skin grows paler, his hair darker, and dark veins spread across his face. After the twelfth colossus, the warriors led by Emon come into view. Urged on by Dormin, Wander rides for the sixteenth and largest upright colossus. A long bridge begins collapsing under him halfway across, and Agro hurls him to safety before she falls into the river below.

  When the last idol crumbles, Emon's company stands in the temple to watch. Wander returns pallid, with silver eyes and short horns, and Emon condemns him for stealing the sword and trespassing. One of Emon's men stabs Wander through the heart. A newly whole Dormin seizes his body and rises as a shadowy giant, and Emon hurls the Ancient Sword into a pool at the back of the hall. A whirlwind of light swallows both Dormin and Wander. The bridge behind the fleeing warriors collapses, cutting the land off from the world, and Emon voices hope that Wander might one day atone.

  Mono wakes to find Agro limping into the temple with an injured hind leg. At the pool, she finds a male infant with short horns. She carries him after the horse to higher levels of the shrine, and they arrive at a secret garden.

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• 7. Release And Reception

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  In early September 2004, Sony revealed the game on the official Japanese PlayStation website alongside Genji: Dawn of the Samurai. A press conference on the 10th of September followed, with Ueda and Kaido presenting and an orchestra playing music from the game. The naming was contested. The native title translates as Wanda and the Colossus, and the European branch wanted to call it Ico 2. Sony Computer Entertainment America proposed Shadow of the Colossus for North America, and Ueda liked a simpler, more direct name than the abstract Ico.

  Unlike Ico, this game got a massive advertising push across magazines, television and websites. In Japan, pre-orders at 7-Eleven stores earned buyers bookmarks with artwork from the game. A limited first edition came with promotional videos and production footage of NICO. At the 2005 Akihabara Entertainment Festival, custom copies and branded merchandise went on sale, and a colossus appeared on a billboard. A viral campaign called Giantology claimed to show real-world evidence for colossi.

  The game reached North America on the 18th of October 2005 and Japan on the 27th of October 2005, at a list price of 7,140 yen. The PAL version followed in February 2006 with art cards, a making-of documentary and a trailer for Ico, which was re-released alongside it. In Japan, it sold 140,000 copies in its first week and reached number one. Almost 80 percent of the initial shipment sold within two days. It joined Sony's Greatest Hits list on the 6th of August 2006.

  Critics were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The game averaged 91 percent at GameRankings, making it the 11th-highest rated game of 2005. Famitsu scored it 37 out of 40, and IGN gave it 9.7 out of 10. GameSpot wrote that its "aesthetic presentation is unparalleled, by any standard". Reviewers often counted the soundtrack among its greatest strengths, and Electronic Gaming Monthly named it Soundtrack of the Year.

  The complaints were just as specific. An erratic frame rate dragged during fast colossus battles, and GameSpy called the camera "as much of an opponent as the Colossi". Reviewers were mixed on Agro, and Edge called her controls clumsy, crude and unpredictable. Some critics felt a playthrough of six to eight hours offered little reason to return. GameSpot even nominated the game for Most Aggravating Frame Rate.

  The awards were many. At the 2006 Game Developers Choice Awards it won Game of the Year and one of three Innovation Awards. At the D.I.C.E. Summit, it took the awards for art direction and visual engineering. IGN named it the best game of 2005 and cited Agro as the best sidekick in video game history.

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• 8. An Enduring Influence

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  Elden Ring in 2022 is one of the games cited as showing the influence of Shadow of the Colossus. The list also includes God of War II in 2007, God of War III in 2010, Titan Souls in 2015, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2017, Death's Gambit in 2018 and Praey for the Gods in 2019. Director Guillermo del Toro calls both Ico and this game masterpieces and counts them among his influences. The game is also cited often in debates over whether video games can be art.

  The 2007 film Reign Over Me, directed by Mike Binder, gives the game a role in the grief of Adam Sandler's character, whose wife and children died in the September 11 attacks. Falling giants echo the crashing towers, and a hero trying to resurrect his dead love echoes his own loss. Sandler is said to have ad libbed a detailed description of the controls in a scene with Don Cheadle. Both actors reportedly became expert at the game during filming.

  Bluepoint Games remastered the game for the PlayStation 3, announced at Tokyo Game Show 2010 and released in September 2011 as The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection. It added high-definition graphics, trophies, 3D support and material missing from the North American release. Sony announced a PlayStation 4 remake at E3 in 2017, and it arrived on the 6th of February 2018. Bluepoint rebuilt every asset from scratch but kept the original gameplay, adding a new control scheme.

  Ueda had left Sony by then, yet he sent Bluepoint a list of recommended changes. He said he doubted many would be adopted, and he did not expect the colossi cut from the original to be added.

  In April 2009, Sony Pictures was reported to be adapting the game into a film, with Kevin Misher negotiating to produce and Ueda involved. Josh Trank was named director in May 2012, and Andrés Muschietti replaced him in September 2014. In January 2025, Muschietti said on Radio TU that the film was still in development and that he liked the script, but that securing his desired budget remained difficult.

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