PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida says the PS4 cult classic action-adventure game The Last Guardian probably wouldn’t have survived at a normal publisher, and that even as technical issues confounded the developers, he insisted on its release.
Speaking during the 2025 Taipei Game Show (via IGN Japan and with translation from Genki), Yoshida spoke on The Last Guardian’s famously lengthy development, which began in earnest at Team Ico in 2007, nine years before its release in 2016. The game was originally in development for release on PS3, but the console’s hardware wasn’t keeping up with the developers’ ambitions for the game.
According to Yoshida, The Last Guardian was running at a staggeringly low 10-15 FPS on PS3, and after trying everything they could think of to achieve more favorable performance, PlayStation shifted its development over to PS4 where a lot of the pre-existing programming had to be started over from scratch.
Yoshida also said he doesn’t think The Last Guardian would’ve stood up to scrutiny at a different publisher. However, he insisted on delivering for fans of Team Ico and its previous efforts, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Yoshida also had a lot of confidence in The Last Guardian director Fumito Uedo’s vision, which gave him a ‘failure is not an option’ mentality. At some point, he decided “‘whatever happens we have to release it!’ and kept on saying to everyone ‘let’s do our best!’ to get it done.”
The Last Guardian suffered numerous setbacks in addition to the aforementioned technical challenges, chiefly among them the departure of Ueda and other key members of Team Ico in 2011. Thankfully, Ueda created a new studio with Ico and Shadow of the Colossus lead programmer Jinji Horagai, as well as other members of Team Ico, and helped Sony get to the finish line with The Last Guardian through contract work. In hindsight, and with these fresh insights from Yoshida, it’s something of a minor miracle that we ended up getting The Last Guardian at all.
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