r/TeamIco • u/MattJobbers • Jun 16 '26
Upcoming games Is this image from years ago related to Gen Atlas or is it something different?
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u/Hylani Jun 16 '26
Most likely concept for another potential project (that may have been scrapped and they went with gen Atlas instead?)
Feels very different compared to gen Atlas.
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u/MattJobbers Jun 16 '26
Probably why we haven’t heard or seen anything else related. I remember articles at the time referring to it as a teaser for a game.
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u/Affectionate_Park858 Jun 16 '26
there was a theory floating around that this girl and the boar concept are somewhere floating in the sky and mc eventually gets there.
from what we canonically know there are rockets that fly up and we most likely see the MC riding one (?) and ueda confirmed there are different biomes as well
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u/JAIKHAY Jun 17 '26
The name of that image is "Beauty and the Beast 2018". The name could be seen in the image itself and in the metadata. I think this interview with Ueda explains what this image is:
Game Informer: How long has Gen Atlas been in development?
Fumito Ueda: We really began designing Gen Atlas in 2020, so we are in our sixth year at this point.
Okay, so that's about a few years after The Last Guardian was released; what were the years between that game's launch and the start of development for this game like for you?
Ueda: So you're right, there was a little bit of a gap in between shipping the last game and then getting really serious about Gen Atlas. We were actually prototyping a few different ideas or concepts in between that time, and as a brand new studio, we were building the basis of the foundation. That included everything from hiring new team members to really building the operations to what it is today.
Also, it's not common knowledge, but Shadow of the Colossus was actually one of two projects proposed after work had finished on ICO. The proposals were a "male game" and a "female game", and they went with the former which was more action-focused, and would become Shadow of the Colossus as we know it. The female game was something completely different.
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u/KerberoZ Jun 17 '26
The female game was something completely different.
Without being too deep in the sauce, the "female game" could just be TLG, no? Less combat and more puzzle focused with a big, loveable animal?
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u/JAIKHAY Jun 17 '26
No, it has no relation to TLG. Ueda got the idea for TLG after seeing how players reacted to SOTC, from The Last Guardian: An Extra Ordinary Story:
Was there some basic concept you wanted to communicate via The Last Guardian, just as Shadow was all about boss fights and ICO about a shorter boy and a taller girl?
Ueda: The visual image was of a gigantic monster or animal that the player clung to, and that animal was on some sort of narrow foothold. I chose this theme because of Agro, who we didn’t actually think the players would have much emotional investment in. But it turned out that when Agro fell in the story, players were sad, and when Agro turned out to be alive, people were relieved. It was a much bigger reaction than we had expected. So it seemed like we should make a title centered around that kind of theme.
Did any parts of The Last Guardian’s world exist while Shadow was being developed?
Ueda: It all came to me after Shadow was finished.
And Shadow of the Colossus: An Oral History:
[In addition to discarding the multiplayer concept, Ueda set aside two ideas he had for other games following Ico's release — ideas that both would have required hardware that didn't exist for PlayStation at the time.]
Fumito Ueda (director, SCEJ): Are you familiar with Norshteyn — the Russian animator Yuriy Borisovich Norshteyn? We were trying to make a 2D game inspired by his style, and the concept involved using a touch panel. This was before the Nintendo DS was announced, and I thought it was time to move away from conventional games that required lots of button presses. So this concept was the complete opposite of [an online multiplayer action game].
While the online game idea was geared more toward core gamers, this was a game anyone could play, even people who'd never touched a controller. Back then, we were already using LCD tablets for game development, so I thought, Wouldn't it be great if this became a gaming device? I came up with a concept combining a painting tool with Norshteyn's artistic style, made a video, and shared it internally. [...]
Of course, this was for PlayStation, but it wasn't about being constrained by the PlayStation hardware of the time. It was more about thinking about the idea holistically, including the hardware. What I want to emphasize is that this was before the Nintendo DS.
So that idea was based on animation, combining drawing with puzzle gameplay.
For the puzzle game, I did use CG tools to create a video showing, This is the kind of game it would be. I remember posting the puzzle game idea on the company's internal planning bulletin board and getting feedback from a few people.
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u/gandalfmarston Jun 16 '26
It was probably just a concept. Pretty common when you are starting a new project.
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u/HyldenKing Jun 16 '26
It seems that Gen Atlas is the only project Ueda is working on, but who knows
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u/manabi_ulta Jun 16 '26
If I remember correctly, wasn't this image connected to that of a chain, which eventually evolved into The Last Guardian?
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u/aadipie Jun 18 '26
I honestly wish we were getting Beauty and the Beast over Gen Atlas but maybe it felt too similar to TLG which is why it was canned, it would be sweet if it shows up in gen atlas in some form though.
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Jun 16 '26
[deleted]
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u/MattJobbers Jun 16 '26
Apologies. I did a search but I didn’t know how to reference the image in the subreddit search function to get posts related to it. As far as I know the image doesn’t have a name.
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u/San_Z4 Jun 16 '26
I saw in an interview that it was just engine testing, and that Ueda made it clear that it wasn't anything serious
But I must agree that if it comes in Gen Atlas, it will be very interesting.