Gamers have been looking forward to The Last Guardian since the first rumblings began to appear shortly after the release of Team Ico's Shadow of the Colossus. The game is finally almost here - the culmination of an extremely lengthy and sometimes rocky development process that has, in some ways, overshadowed the game itself. We've been covering the game since its first trailer, all the way up through the official announcement of its completion. The Last Guardian holds the unusual distinction of being one of our most anticipated games for three different years, appearing as an entry on our "Most Anticipated Games" list in 2010, 2011, and 2012.
Ahead of E3 2009, the trailer for "Project Trico," the next game from Team Ico, leaked out. Project Trico was the internal codename given to the project that would become The Last Guardian. For Team Ico fans, and PlayStation fans as a whole, it was an exciting glimpse at the anticipated next game from the creators of Shadow of the Colossus. The official announcement for The Last Guardian came during Sony's E3 2009 press conference, during which the first official trailer for the then-PS3 exclusive was shown off.
The excitement around The Last Guardian was very real, and the game made our list of most-anticipated games of 2010. The game failed to reach its first intended release, however. At Tokyo Game Show in 2010, Sony announced The Last Guardian would ship in time for the holidays in 2011.
The new release window once again landed the game on our end-of-year most-anticipated games list, this time for 2011.
Until March 2011, the only thing we'd seen of The Last Guardian was pre-recorded trailer footage. The animation, graphics, and tone of the actual game were still a complete unknown, even though the game was first officially revealed in 2009. What we were treated to was a hands-off demo that managed to convey an emotional connection with the game's griffon-like beast. It seemed to hit all the right notes for a Team Ico game, and the preview only increased excitement.
Image from our 2011 The Last Guardian preview.
Image from our 2011 The Last Guardian preview.
Just over a month after our first look at The Last Guardian in action, news broke that the game was being pushed back once again, this time to 2012. Game designer Fumito Ueda took to the official PlayStation blog to make the announcement. Citing a desire to provide "more challenging and better quality of content to users," Ueda apologized to gamers and promised a new release date "at a later time." In September 2011 we were treated to a look behind the scenes of the development process for the remastered versions of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Among the development footage was a brief look at The Last Guardian.
In December 2011, rumors began to swirl of the departure of Ueda from Sony. However, the creator insisted work on The Last Guardian was still happening. Later the Fumito Ueda departure from Sony was confirmed by both Sony and Ueda, but the designer was still on-board to work on the game in a contract-basis. In all the confusion, GameStop cancelled pre-orders for The Last Guardian, informing customers the game had officially been cancelled. Sony later confirmed with us this was an error on the part of GameStop, and work on The Last Guardian still continued on. The following year, The Last Guardian was entirely absent from E3 2012. Just after E3, Sony president Shuhei Yoshida assured gamers The Last Guardian was still in development. Genuine concern for the future of the game reached a boiling point in August 2012 when reports the trademark for The Last Guardian had been abandoned surfaced. But Sony once again assured fans The Last Guardian was still in development for PS3.
In the same month, The Last Guardian producer Kenji Kaido officially announced his departure from Sony. The game had been shadowed by dark clouds for years, and another high-profile departure had those clouds looking more and more like a storm. Ueda assured restless gamers The Last Guardian was still in production in February, but in June 2013 the game was officially put on hiatus. Even though the game was officially on hiatus, Ueda said development on The Last Guardian still continued "in earnest." Sony's priorities in 2013 had shifted away from the game and it was focusing on the launch of the PlayStation 4. The Sony studio working on The Last Guardian was helping develop Knack for PS4 and Puppeteer for PS3.
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