Sony's E3 conference had a lot of gaming fans crying tears of joy, as it announced that several games at the top of fans' wish lists were coming to its PlayStation 4 platform. For me, the most impactful of those announcements was the news that The Last Guardian, a game that's been in development hell for close to a decade, will finally cross the finish line on PS4 at some point next year.
Last Guardian is the long-awaited third game from Fumito Ueda, the designer of Sony's games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. These weren't huge mainstream hits, but they're exactly the sort of prestige software that a console maker should be producing: Genre-bending, experimental, artistic, risky. Ico debuted in 2001 to tepid sales, but today it's cited by game developers far and wide as incredibly influential.
Originally developed for PlayStation 3, Last Guardian was wildly ambitious. The previous two games had focused on a pair of characters that explored the world together: a boy and a girl in Ico, a boy and a horse in Colossus. In Last Guardian, a boy would make the acquaintance of and travel with a giant bird-cat creature named Trico. Instead of climbing up the back of a giant Colossus to kill it, you could climb up on the back of your giant creature and hug it. Intoxicating. But also technically difficult to pull off, on the PlayStation 3. Eventually, Sony moved the project to PS4.
Following the trailer that was shown at Sony's press conference at E3 last week, WIRED got a look at the game running live, with Ueda on hand to explain some of what was going on.
Sony
