Shadow of the Colossus

Fumito Ueda's team began the follow-up to Ico the moment that game shipped in December 2001. The project, provisionally called NICO, was going to be an online multiplayer game that "wouldn't require complex level design." Ueda wanted a game about "cruelty as a means of expression," built from a childhood love of monster movies and an irritation with boss fights you shot from a distance: what if you could climb the thing? The programmers spent more than six months on "organic collision deformation," the physics that let a character run along a giant's horizontal limb. By the time full production started in September 2003 the team had concluded it wasn't equipped to ship an online game and rebuilt it as a single-player one, almost from scratch.

Ueda had planned 48 colossi, cut the list to 24, then to 16 so that each could be finished properly; a day-night cycle and weather went too, casualties of PlayStation 2 memory. He drew the land after trips to the Grand Canyon and Death Valley. Kow Otani, composer of the 1990s Gamera films, wrote the score. When Ueda first cut a colossus's death to a melancholy film song, his staff burst out laughing, and he kept the idea anyway. Around 40 people worked on it for three and a half years. In Japan it was Wanda and the Colossus; Sony's European arm wanted to call it Ico 2, and the American office's title stuck.

It reached North America on October 18, 2005 and Japan nine days later, where it topped the chart with 140,000 copies in a week. Famitsu gave it 37 out of 40, IGN a 9.7 and "an absolute must-have title," GameSpot an 8.7 with the note that its "aesthetic presentation is unparalleled." The frame rate stuttered in the big fights and the whole thing ran six to eight hours. It still won Game of the Year, Best Game Design, Best Visual Arts and an Innovation award at the 2006 Game Developers Choice Awards, Soundtrack of the Year from Electronic Gaming Monthly, and IGN's verdict that Agro was the best sidekick in video game history.

The game has been cited in arguments about games as art ever since; the 2007 film Reign Over Me used it as the thing Adam Sandler's grieving character retreats into. A group of fans spent a decade hunting a rumored seventeenth colossus and turned up cut content instead. Bluepoint Games remastered it for the PlayStation 3 in 2011 and remade it for the PlayStation 4 in 2018.