GAME · 2005 · JAPAN
Shadow of the Colossus
- Developer
- Team Ico
- Publisher
- Sony Interactive Entertainment
- Platforms
- PlayStation 3
- Original title
- Wanda to kyozô
29 archived facts 3 topics 1 source Last reviewed Nov 2026
29 Interesting Facts About Shadow of the Colossus
Interesting Facts (5)
- #001
If the player eats enough lizard tails to maximize Wander's stamina, they can reach the secret garden above the temple. Reaching this garden is extremely difficult; it requires climbing the temple's front facade and making it to the top of the bridge. Interestingly, this is the very same garden where Mono and Agro take the baby at the end of the game.
- #002
Although it is not stated in the game, Team Ico revealed that the main character's name is Wander and the woman he is trying to resurrect is named Mono.
- #003
The game plays a significant role in Mike Bender's 2007 film Reign Over Me. In the film, Charlie Fineman plays the game to cope with the pain of losing his family in the September 11 attacks; each Colossus falling to the ground was thought to evoke the collapse of the World Trade Center. The game was included in the film with Fumito Ueda's approval.
- #004
If Wander goes up to Agro and presses the circle button, he gently strokes his horse.
- #005
Nearly all the Colossi are positioned so that they can see the Shrine of Worship.
Production Story (17)
- #006
Fumito Ueda cited The Legend of Zelda series as an influence on Shadow of the Colossus, saying he grew up wanting to make a game like Zelda and designing the Colossi bosses as "inverted Zelda dungeons."
- #007
Before development began, Team Ico considered making its next project a sequel to its first game, Ico, but some staff members opposed the idea, arguing that the earlier title's story and gameplay were largely self-contained and that demand for a new Ico game was questionable.
- #008
According to Ueda, Team Ico believed that building levels for a single-player game like Ico would require elaborate puzzles, an approach the staff wanted to avoid.
- #009
After lengthy deliberations, Team Ico decided against an Ico sequel and chose instead to make a standalone game provisionally called NICO, a portmanteau of the Japanese word for two, ni, and Ico.
- #010
Team Ico initially agreed to develop NICO as an online multiplayer game that, unlike Ico, would not require complex level design; according to Kaido, the foundational goal was a technology demo representing a tentative version of the game's fictional world and features. Development started right after Ico's Japanese release in December 2001.
- #011
To develop the concept video for NICO, Team Ico formed a small internal group made up of Ueda, one of Ico's designers and an animation team of roughly 10 people.
- #012
According to Kaido, the team considered the demonstration video to have reached a very high level of completion and used it as a reference point throughout production of Shadow of the Colossus.
- #013
As producer, Kaido assigned the team to add technological features he considered important development milestones, including what he called "organic collision deformation" — his concept of realistic character physics tied to how the colossi move.
- #014
Kaido expected that a player could run across a colossus' limb as if it were any other flat surface whenever that limb was horizontal.
- #015
Ueda and Team Ico programmers spent more than six months producing a working version of that functionality, starting by placing a character in a virtual environment where the figure could climb a pole-like object; a priority was coding a physics-based simulation of characters being shaken off or narrowly avoiding being stomped on.
- #016
In May 2003, Team Ico assembled a demonstrational build known as NICO and presented it at a production meeting. Full development of Shadow of the Colossus was sanctioned directly after it was pitched and began the same month.
- #017
For Shadow of the Colossus, Team Ico set aside the development tools and engine used on Ico and wrote new programming utilities and a dedicated game engine.
- #018
Although Team Ico had intended to reuse its Ico development practices for Shadow of the Colossus, the move away from the older game's technology meant the successor was built almost from the ground up again.
- #019
Publisher SCEI granted Shadow of the Colossus more development time, funding and creative freedom than the Ico team had received, a decision the company based on Ico's critical success.
- #020
Kaido and Ueda sought new collaborators for Shadow of the Colossus, especially artistic specialists, through job advertisements in Japanese trade media and word of mouth; ten of five hundred applicants were hired.
- #021
Ueda felt that only one or two of the ten recruits met his criteria, as he expected every facet of Shadow of the Colossus to be as well-crafted as possible.
- #022
During development of the colossi, the team had difficulty choreographing certain enemy motions to match staff expectations, prompting Team Ico to rework the original programming solution that animated the colossi's movements.
Behind the Scenes (7)
- #023
The NICO concept video showed three masked, horned boys riding horseback through a vast landscape and attacking a towering being reminiscent of the second boss in Shadow of the Colossus.
- #024
The NICO concept video was visualized in the Ico game engine and rendered in real time on PlayStation 2 hardware, a technique the team used to gauge how far the platform's capabilities could realize their vision.
- #025
The demonstration video for Shadow of the Colossus showed elements that were excluded from the released game, including a gameplay mechanism in which an attacker who had scaled and killed a colossus leapt from its corpse onto the back of his approaching horse.
- #026
Although Team Ico tried to work on the game in secrecy, images of NICO's horseriding characters were leaked onto the Internet, leading enthusiasts to speculate about what they saw as a sequel to Ico.
- #027
Team Ico used player feedback to test the "organic collision deformation" system for Shadow of the Colossus, entering simple objects to explore what the system could do.
- #028
To plan the visual elements of Shadow of the Colossus, Ueda used 3D computer graphics software rather than sketching on paper, because converting hand-drawn artwork into polygonal shapes would have greatly reduced the reproduced assets' level of detail.
- #029
For Shadow of the Colossus, Ueda gave suggestions to the team's scenery designers, who applied them to the game; after the individual colossi locations were visualized in the engine, the group built the setting by adding intermediary areas between the enemies' lairs.
Sources & editorial notes
Sources for the entries on this page
- Wikipedia Shadow of the Colossus — Wikipedia
Information from external sources is independently selected, consolidated and edited by Arka Evren. Sources are listed for verification and further reading. Encyclopedia text is used under its licence (CC BY-SA). How we work