50 things about ICO and Shadow of the Colossus

1. Yorda had a haircut done the day before the master was due

2. The team went horse riding to get Agro's animations right

3. Fumito Ueda visited the Great Canyon to research Shadow of the Colossus

4. Originally ICO was meant to be released on PSone because then the PS2 didn't have many good games

5. ICO's concept was inspired by a Japanese TV commercial with a lady holding the hand of a child, walking through the woods

6. Yorda was the one to wear horns

7. She was also going to have cursed runes on her hand

8. ICO's story was to be very different. Yorda was a princess trapped in a small room and the boy a slave worker in the castle who found the room and helped the girl escape

9. Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair was used as background music in the original ICO pilot movie, which was used to pitch the game to Sony

10. It also became the inspiration to ICO's theme song, You Were There

11. You Were There is sung by a boy, Steven Geraghty

12. Staff members used to wonder why they were working on Yorda's strange movements (strolling around, following birds) because they didn't affect gameplay in any way

13. Ueda went for these because according to him "we are all attracted by the quirks of girlfriends"

14. Many more of these "quirks" were planned but time was an issue

15. Ueda had never been to a castle prior to ICO so he based the queen's castle in the game on the work of artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi

16. Deserted cars near rice fields and semi-built up areas in the Japanese countryside were the things which at first inspired ICO's castle

17. The team intentionally avoided using the maximum graphic specs in order to give ICO something different and make it stand out

18. Fumito Ueda started working on Shadow of the Colossus even before his first game was released in Europe

19. Shadow of the Colossus was at first called NICO, a pun on Japanese word "Ni" meaning "Two"

20. ICO is a pun on Japanese expressions meaning "Let's go"

21. The team was considering calling Shadow of the Colossus "Dragon Hearts" and "Dragon Peace" before the story was even planned

22. [SPOILERS] Fumito Ueda's own interpretation of ICO's ending is that Ico is dreaming of meeting Yorda once again. The second water melon ending is another dream Ico has

23. [SPOILERS] His interpretation of the ending in Shadow of the Colossus, on the other hand is that Wander sires the line of horned children

24. Ico was given horns because it was not easy to make a distinction between the two characters from a distance

25. The Japanese name of Shadow of the Colossus, "Wander to Kyozo" doesn't refer to the main character's name. It was used to show what the game's about - to wander around and colossi

26. In ICO's two-player mode, Yorda can carry bombs

27. She can also swim, if prompted to by using bombs to drop her into water

28. Amusingly, Fumito Ueda was so modest, he failed to have an English acceptance speech ready at the Game Developer Choice Awards 2006, clearly not expecting the game to win the "Game of the Year" award

29. Yorda is 16 years old

30. Shadow of the Colossus was featured in the movie "Reign Over Me". Reason for choosing it was "You could see where someone who was dealing with 9/11 would be engrossed by a giant that keeps collapsing over and over again"

31. Fumito Ueda decided to go for a video game career when he thought "how wonderful it might be to be someone who touches others through his creations"

32. He filled 11 roles in the development of his first game, ICO

33. One of them was to design the logo and draw the box art himself

34. He also single-handedly created the pilot movie in three months using Lightwave 3D, which he taught himself

35. When the team published an advert on Weekly Famitsu Magazine looking for staff to work on Shadow of the Colossus, some 500 applications were received

36. 10 people made it to team

37. Only 1 of them satisfied Ueda's standards of quality

38. All of the animations in Shadow of the Colossus were drawn by hand

39. Someone from the team mysteriously added an early model of Mono in a scarecrow pose in the door to the secret garden in the demo. It's mostly strange because the garden was only reachable by using a jumping glitch in that build

40. More than 24 colossi were designed for Shadow of the Colossus

41. A squirrel was added to the ending in Shadow of the Colossus in PAL territories. It was also added in the Japanese 'PlayStation the Best' version

42. There were some songs which were composed for Shadow of the Colossus but never made it in the game. They can be found in the original soundtrack CD

43. The bridge in Shadow of the Colossus spans through half the game world, making it the largest bridge in any game yet

44. In ICO, the caskets in which horned children are imprisoned have little slits. They're not for the children to look outside considering they would be facing the opposite way.

45. Ico's language is a deformed version of Japanese, intended to sound familiar to Japanese players

46. Yorda's runic language is written by substituting backwards Japanese Romaji and spoken backwards Japanese

47. The language in Shadow of the Colossus is the same as the one Ico uses but it's been more deformed by adding in Romanisation and Latin dialect to make it sound more ancient

48. [SPOILERS] Wander's shadow, when being sucked in the pool in the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, can still whistle for Agro

49. [SPOILERS] The baby in the same ending is controllable. You can press any of the face buttons to make him wiggle around and cry

50. Fumito Ueda's job application letter to Sony included a picture of a cat

50 things you probably didn't know about ICO and Shadow of the Colossus