The main character wakes up on a beach wearing a flowing tunic that looks just like the costumes worn by the Ico and Shadow of the Colossus main characters, runs and climbs through abandoned, crumbling ruins, then slashes at a group of encroaching shadow-monsters by swinging a stick around. To be published by Sony as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, Rime's debut trailer gives off some seriously heavy Ico vibes right from the start.
"That's actually why Brothers is a top-down game," he says the bird's-eye-view camera is meant to mimic the angles used in those early classics.Īll I can say is that I'm intimately familiar with all of those games as well and never got a Super Nintendo flashback from Brothers – from the way it wordlessly conveys the relationship between the two characters through simple gameplay actions, to the natural, quiet, serent beauty of its environments, to the way its levels are structured around giant pieces of machinery and dizzying climbs up crumbling architecture, it felt much more Ico than Secret of Mana to me.Īnother recent game being compared to Ico is Rime, by Raul Rubio's studio Tequila Works. "Ico is definitely an inspiration," said Brothers director Josef Fares, but says that in his opinion, "even more" of an influence were 16-bit role-playing games from the Super Nintendo, like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. Fez creator Phil Fish says he relied on Ueda's "design by subtraction" ethos in making his game. Vander Caballero cited it as a strong influence on the gameplay of his semi-autobiographical game Papo & Yo last year. While one kind of has to take Holmes' and Wells' word for it about Ico's influence on their largely dissimilar mass-market blockbuster games, its influence is much more tangible when one examines some recent titles from smaller studios. we're focused on making right now." And while film director Guillermo del Toro loves many different videogames, he said in 2008 that Ico and Colossus were the "only two games I consider masterpieces." "I'll always be influenced by that game, probably in ways that I don’t even understand, because it's definitely one of the pinnacle moments in my gaming career."ĭuring the development of Uncharted 3 on PlayStation 3, Naughty Dog creative director Nate Wells name-checked Ico as "the kind of game. "I think there's a lot of similarity in just the core relationship between the boy in Ico and Princess Yorda, and Chief and Cortana, that bond they have, that need to be there for one another," Halo 4's creative director Josh Holmes told Time on its release last year. Nowadays, if you ask the developers of games with close relationships between their characters about their inspirations, you hear Ico come up quite a bit.
Even with a worldwide release backed by a Sony marketing campaign, it barely cleared half a million units.īut still, it hung on in the minds of those who did experience it and its sequel Shadow of the Colossus performed much better in the sales charts (if still not anywhere close to blockbuster status). Ico was not understandable through screenshots and its gameplay mechanics could be described in a single paragraph. By looking at the feature lists and screenshots showing the heads-up display elements, gamers could figure out what type of game it was. In 2001, you made consumers aware of games by putting screenshots into print magazines. About a year after Ico was released, I spoke with Ueda and he said that the minimalist style of the game was a big negative for Sony's marketing efforts. Unfortunately, not very many players at the time got to experience those feelings. Everywhere you look, you're standing in Ico's shadow.
It's also cited as an influence on the biggest of the big triple-A blockbusters, like Halo and Uncharted. And I don't just mean indie efforts like Brothers. What was once an obscure niche game is now increasingly cited as a source of inspiration for current games. Almost 12 years after its quiet debut on Sony's then-new PlayStation 2, Ico ( ee-koh) seems to be more popular now than it ever was then. It was a feeling I'd been getting a lot recently. These, I thought, had to be an homage to the similar repeated scenes in that cult classic, released in September 2001. I'd already been getting a bit of an Ico vibe from this new Xbox game I was playing, called Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but the benches clinched it. If you saw that scene in a recent videogame, would it make you think of an old game called Ico? If so, we're on the same wavelength.
Two youths on an adventure together, having just come through dangerous territory, spy a nearby bench and sit on it to rest, taking a quiet, serene moment before their next trial.
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