Cage pays tribute to ICO developer
"He has a real sense of poetry."
Heavy Rain developer David Cage has described ICO and Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda as one of "very, very few artists" working in videogames.
"I really think he has something interesting and something unique. He has a real sense of poetry in his games. It's very different from how I see games and what I want to make, but I really love his work," Cage told Eurogamer during a visit to Paris to see Heavy Rain in development, adding that ICO and Shadow are the only two games that have the emotional impact he sought in Fahrenheit and seeks again now.
"I think the more it goes, the more this industry will need art directors and less producers," he elaborates, rolling his eyes a little as he says "producers". "We'll still need producers, of course, but we need to feel that there are people behind games. I've always loved games that have a soul, where you can feel the people behind them, and it's rare these days."
Cage also paid tribute to UK-based Media Molecule for its work on LittleBigPlanet. "LittleBigPlanet is a game with a soul," he said, "and when you play it you love this game, because you play so many games that are just cold fish.
"It can be a beautiful fish! It can smell good, it can taste good. But it's just a dead fish. And here you feel that there are human beings behind it."
Heavy Rain - which Cage described as "telling a complex story through contextual actions and realistic visuals" - is due out exclusively on PlayStation 3 in the second half of 2009. You can learn more about how it's going in our Heavy Rain preview.