Fumito Ueda

• • Name: Fumito Ueda

  • Notable creations and work: Enemy Zero, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Tha Guardian

  • Born: 1970

  • Died: Still alive

Biographical Summary

Fumito Ueda was born in Tatsuno, Hyogo prefecture, Japan in 1970. As far as he could remember, He had always been interested in animation. Ueda studied art in school and admits that he would have been a classical artist if circumstances were different. He studied at the Osaka University of Arts and graduated in 1993. Ueda tried to make a living making art for two years before starting a career in the video game industry. He joined WARP in 1995 and worked on a game called Enemy Zero, for the Sega Saturn. In 1997, he left WARP to join Sony Computer Entertainment where he built his reputation.

Work

Fumito Ueda has worked as an animator for Enemy Zero for the Sega Saturn in 1995. At SCE, he worked as a designer on Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Ueda's games have a unique style that focus very little on dialog and very heavily on body language and animation. He plays with environments that are often, in themselves, massive puzzles that can be (and are usually meant to be) thoroughly explored. He calls this approach to game design "design by subtraction."

Enemy Zero

Ueda worked on Enemy Zero as a animator when he was employed with WARP. It was an unpleasant time in his life--he and the other people who worked on Enemy Zero had to work unusually long hours to meet short deadlines. Still, it was his first contribution to the video game industry.

• Gameplay footage

Ico

Ueda worked on Ico with Kenji Kaido to make a game whose design centered around three major ideas. They wanted to make a game that was intrinsically different from anything else--it was consistent with its imaginary, yet believable environment and art style. He utilized a method called "design by subtraction," which eliminated some aspects and unnecessary elements of the game to create a more wholesome experience. There is no interface, only one type of enemy and only one goal: escape from the castle.

The player and Yorda must work together to overcome certain obstacles.

There is only one type of enemy

Shadow of the Colossus

Ueda wanted to change the way people perceive certain aspects of games. Ever the innovator, Ueda wanted to give a unique experience through SotC. Throughout the game, the concept of what a boss battle is shattered as the only enemies are sixteen colossi and they can only be taken on independently and each have different fighting tactics. Again, you can spot the elements of "design by subtraction."

Programmers focused more heavily on the colossi than any other aspect of the game because Ueda wanted them to be as well refined as possible.

References

• • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Colossus

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ico

  • http://www.thecursedlands.com/wiki/index.php/Fumito_Ueda

  • http://www.gamespot.com/users/Panzer_Zwei/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25594218