- Author
- Matt Leone (Design Room)
- Published
- 14 October 2025
- Kind
- Journalistic oral history built from interviews with 14 people
- Original
- www.designroom.site/shadow-of-the-colossus-oral-history/
- Subject
- Making visual worlds
- Themes
- Invented worlds, How forms evolve
What it is
Design Room, a games-industry publication, ran this piece for the game's 20th anniversary. Leone interviewed 14 people, 11 of whom worked on the game. The piece arranges their quotes into a narrative.
What it says
- Director Fumito Ueda says the game began as project Nico, a cooperative online monster-hunting idea.
- Ueda cut the multiplayer early, judging that the project could not realistically support it.
- The piece says Ueda has often described 48 planned colossi, cut to 16.
- Ueda and Kenji Kaido say they showed managers edited footage to extend the schedule.
- Ueda says a plan for music that changed with the fight was dropped for crossfading.
- Sony America staff say they asked for save shrines and easier bosses after testing.
- Kyle Shubel recalls about 800,000 units sold in America, and over a million worldwide.
What evidence it gives
The piece rests entirely on interview recollections from participants. Some quotes were translated from Japanese. Accounts sometimes conflict, for example over whether the US office turned the game down. Sales figures are from memory.
Interests and limits
Interviewees recall events from 20 years ago and may flatter themselves or their employer. Several worked for Sony, which published the game. Extended interviews are paywalled and were not part of the text read. Nearly all voices are Sony staff, with a composer and one outside programmer.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates. Both records are shaped by what got removed. The plan Ueda describes fell from 48 colossi to 16. The chip intro was trimmed to 293 flip-flops. Here the limit is not an obstacle to the design, but part of its history.
- Live Action Mecha of the '80s and '90s. Ueda and Kaido edited footage to show managers a game running better than it did. O'Mara's promos also advertised worlds on budgets that could not hold them. In each, the film is an argument for what could exist.