ICO is not a game, says Ueda

Is ICO a videogame? "Yes, you idiot" would be most people's response - but the man who created it would disagree.

In an interview with Wired.com, Fumito Ueda said: "[ICO] isn't a videogame - a conventional videogame has things like a life meter or other icons on the screen. ICO doesn't have these things."

At the start of ICO's development period, Ueda explained, "I thought that the games industry had a negative image for many people. If I called my work a videogame, people would think, 'Well, this is just a videogame, so I don't want to play it.'"

"When we said, ICO is not a conventional videogame title, we set limitations on ourselves for the development of the game. We had to eliminate everything that made it look like a videogame."

But Ueda's next game - Shadow of the Colossus - does feature strength gauges, health meters and the like. So does that mean SotC is a videogame?

"For our next game, we wanted to remove those artificial limitations that we placed on ourselves," Ueda said.

"We wanted to just make a game that was fun. If a limitation made the game less fun, we weren't going to restrict ourselves. And yet, while we were developing Colossus, it became similar to the ICO style. We don't know why."

Of course, the big question we all want to know the answer to is what's next. Ueda declined to answer, though - he simply turned to SotC producer Kenji Kaido and said: "Yeah, what are we going to do?"

"I couldn't tell you," Kaido replied.

"Fumito has a couple of ideas, but we don't even know what the platform is going to be. I want to create a game that takes full advantage of the format it's on. If we made a PS3 or PSP game, we want it to take special advantage of the abilities of that format."