Sony On Last Guardian: The People’s Interest Kept Us Going

When The Last Guardian showed up at E3 2015 , gamers everywhere were surprised and happy.

It has been a long and arduous journey for the game that was originally announced in 2008 as a PlayStation 3 exclusive. Now, PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida talks about the difficult development period.

In a new GameSpot interview , Yoshida first spoke about how Team ICO changed over the years. This included visionary Fumito Ueda but gamers were disappointed when they learned Ueda had left the Guardian project in 2011. He wasn't even a Sony employee any longer.

Yoshida simply called this a "rearrangement of the relationship" and in fact: "Ueda-san was not fired. That was totally bogus. He chose to become independent." Currently, the project team is comprised of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus developers along with Sony's Japan Studio. But why did it take so long to return? Yoshida explains:

"The project went on so many technical changes. We decided to move the project to PS4 in 2012, but because the PS3 code was so optimised for SPUs on that console lots of code had to be thrown away and rebuilt.

It was a tough decision to move from PS3 to PS4 because it was running on PS3. But not at the performance [level] we needed … We knew [we had to decide] whether to continue the game on PS3 with a compromised vision, or move to PS4."

Yoshida added that questions and interest from fans and journalists reinforced Sony's dedication to the project. In other words, the insinuation is that if people weren't so interested, this project may never have happened:

"I believed in the concept. Ueda-san and the core members always wanted to it to be realised. But what made us continue to work was the encouragement from people. Journalists always asked us every year [about it]. We knew lots of people were intrigued by the game and were waiting for it to arrive. Because of that I felt it was my responsibility to get it completed."

Sony didn't want to reveal the game again until they were sure of the project's direction and an estimated release window. This should make people feel a little better about the game's launch, which is now scheduled for 2016. Finished Yoshida:

"My thing was, when we re-announced The Last Guardian, we had to have it totally running on PS4 at the right performance and be confident about the release window that we announced. In our mind, we have the tech, vision, and design down. Lots of levels have already been made, so we are confident about 2016, so we [announced] it."

Related Game(s): The Last Guardian