Fumito Ueda, the director of The Last Guardian, unveiled a new website for his Koto-based independent studio genDESIGN after Sony’s E3 press conference.
You may recall that Ueda left Sony back in in 2011. However, he was contractually obliged to complete the development of The Last Guardian despite having set-up his own studio, which we now know is genDESIGN.
It seems that the studio is mostly formed of members of the team formerly known as Team Ico, as it states that it’s “comprised of Fumito Ueda and a team of veteran developers who led the creation of ‘Ico’ and ‘Shadow of the Colossus’.” The president of genDESIGN is listed as Jinji Horagai who was the AI programmer on Yorda in Icoand the system programmer for Shadow of the Colossus.
The first thing you’ll probably see on the genDESIGN website as it’s used as the background image is what appears to be the corpse of a guardian. As the name of the game says, Trico—the giant feathered creature that you interact with in The Last Guardian—is, well, the last guardian. So there must have been others, right?
The bones in the background image on genDESIGN’s website seem to match up with Trico’s anatomy. The only big difference is that the two horns on Trico’s head are cut down to stubs in The Last Guardian, whereas in this image they are fully intact, so this is presumably one of the other guardians, now dead.
Also on the website are concept art and images from The Last Guardian’s development as the studio lists it as its first and only game made so far. But underneath that the studio alludes to whatever it will work on next with the words “And more” followed by the genSTUDIO logo.
Hopefully we’ll be hearing more from genDESIGN once The Last Guardian is out on PlayStation 4 in 2016. To keep up with any updates from genDESIGN you can follow the studio on Twitter and Facebook.
