Ico shipped with two different covers. The one most people mean is a painting, a boy with horns pulling a girl along through a dreamlike landscape under stone ruins so big the two of them nearly vanish. That’s the Japanese and European box. In North America, where the game came out first, in September 2001, the box was a 3D render instead, the boy holding a stick under a windmill with the girl’s face floating huge in the sky behind him.
Fumito Ueda, who directed the game, painted that one himself, after the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Most pairings of a game with a painting are guesses. This one the director confirmed himself.
Who painted the Ico cover art?
Ueda did. In 2005, with Shadow of the Colossus on the way, the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine interviewed him, and 1UP ran it that September as “A Giant in the Making.” The magazine called the Japanese cover a clever homage to the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico and asked whether Ico itself was inspired by him. Ueda answered:
“I designed the Japanese cover, and I thought the surrealistic world of de Chirico matched the allegoric world of Ico.”
He was asked about the whole game and he answered about the cover, and that small answer is easier to trust than a bigger claim would be. He painted it, and to him de Chirico’s world fit the one Team Ico had already built. Cook & Becker, the gallery that makes the official print of Ueda’s cover, names the painting it draws on: The Nostalgia of the Infinite.
Time Extension got the American box’s story in 2023 from the two men who made it at Beeline, an agency working for Sony. The game came out in North America before Ueda’s painting was finished, so Beeline worked from a few screenshots. Gregory Harsh built the cover in Lightwave, and the creative director, Brian Balistreri, remembers the brief: “they were looking for something straightforward and we gave them something straightforward.” Harsh prefers the Japanese art too. North America got the painting in 2011, sort of: the PS3 Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection put new art on the front and Ueda’s cover on the reverse of the insert, for anyone who flipped it.
De Chirico’s Nostalgia of the Infinite
The Nostalgia of the Infinite is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s a tall, narrow canvas, 135.2 by 64.8 centimetres, and de Chirico wrote 1911 on it, though MoMA dates it to Paris, around 1912 or 1913. Most of it is one white tower, with rings of columns, a red dome and little flags at the top, against a deep green sky. The ground is ochre, lit by a sun you never see, and near the foot of the tower two tiny people stand together while one long shadow runs away from them, far longer than they are tall. On the right edge a dark building with arches sits in its own shade.
The whole mood comes from how low that sun is. A shadow’s length is the height of the thing divided by the tangent of the sun’s angle, so at 45 degrees a tower throws a shadow exactly as long as it is tall, and at 8 degrees it is more than seven times as long. This painting sits in that low, late light, where everything’s shadow outgrows it and the empty ground fills up with dark shapes. Try it on an empty square.
It’s a different use of light from chiaroscuro, where light picks one thing out of the dark. De Chirico lights the whole square evenly and puts the drama in the shadows. He had trained in Munich, where he found Nietzsche and the paintings of Arnold Böcklin, and his empty squares are some of the loneliest places in art. The Ico cover uses the same few parts for the same job, a built place far too big for anyone and two small people who are the only life in it.
Ico’s castle: the fog, the ocean and subtracting design
Ueda started Ico in 1997 from a plain idea, a boy and a girl hand in hand through an adventure, and it took four years to make. He and the producer Kenji Kaido explained how at the Game Developers Conference in 2004. In Ueda’s first concept movie the horns were on the girl; by the PlayStation prototype they had moved to the boy. They wanted a game unlike any other, with a level of art where any still screen of it would hold up on its own, and they got there with what they called subtracting design, which meant removing every element that took away from the game’s reality. One kind of enemy instead of a cast of them. The castle and the escape from it, with no towns around it to visit.
In 2011, at a Sony fan event where Ueda and Keiichiro Toyama talked through the scenes players had voted for, Toyama remembered making everything in the distance dark in Silent Hill because the PlayStation could only show what was close. Ueda answered:
“We couldn’t depict distant imagery in ICO either, so I decided to enclose the surrounding world with an ocean and use thick fog. Doing so would mean I didn’t have to show details.”
So the fog started as a limit of the hardware, and it became the feeling of the place. Take away the far hills and the roads and the villages, put the sea all the way round and fog over the sea, and the castle is the whole world. The two kids inside it have nobody else. Toyama once assumed Ueda had toured real ruins for ideas. He had never visited any; the whole picture was already in his head.
The light inside that fog is the other half. In 2005, 1UP’s James Mielke wrote that the outdoors in Ico are bathed in a broiling midday sun, and that before bloom lighting became the “it” effect, “Ico did it first.” Bloom is the glow that spills past the edges of anything bright. So the game’s light is a high midday sun and de Chirico’s is low and late, and the painting and the game meet in the emptiness more than in the hour. Asked at GDC how well subtracting had worked, Ueda said, “maybe in Ico, I think we subtracted too much!”
Piranesi’s imaginary prisons
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) etched a set of imaginary prisons around 1749 and 1750, the Carceri d’invenzione, and they’re still some of the strangest architecture anyone has drawn. Stairs climb into the dark and turn out of sight, bridges hang from ropes, and the people are so small you find them last.
Cook & Becker says it set Piranesi beside Ueda’s games in its 2014–15 museum exhibition, the Next-Gen Art Event, and side by side it’s easy to see why. This is The Drawbridge, a first-state impression at the Met. Carry the light through it.
What the two share is distance. Ueda said in 2011 that when the boy and the girl first meet, he pulled the camera back so the player would feel like an observer watching something about to happen. You’re far off and up high, and somewhere down there a few people are crossing a bridge you wouldn’t trust.
Holding Yorda’s hand
The hand was there from the start, and in a 2002 interview Ueda explained why. Games then had partner characters that took orders from the player outside the game, and he wanted something that would let the characters communicate more directly, inside it. That’s how he came up with holding hands.
In 2011 he added what the picture did: “In ICO, I thought the image of a boy holding hands with a girl taller than him had a strong visual impact.” Yorda is taller than Ico and she still needs him, because if he leaves her alone too long the shadow creatures come to drag her away.
She doesn’t share his language either. Yorda speaks in a script you can’t read, and at GDC Ueda explained why her lines carry no subtitles: the holding-hands idea depended on the two of them not being able to talk to each other all the time. So the hand is how they talk. In the 2011 talk he said he broke the bridge apart in that scene to tell the player one thing:
“Please keep holding my hand, whatever comes ahead.”
He also said, “In ICO we put all our money on Yorda.” Even the ending leans on her. Asked about it at GDC, he said it might not be sure that Yorda is alive, or that she will stay with Ico, or that she wasn’t a dream: “I wanted a happy ending that was still a little bit vague.”
After Ico: Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian
The next game started out as NICO, a play on “next Ico” and on ni, two in Japanese, and it came out in 2005 as Shadow of the Colossus. Ueda says strong images play a large part in how he works, and for this one it was a boy sitting astride a horse in a vast open grassland. He did one piece of research for it, on riding, because a car never bucks and a horse can throw you at any moment, and that went into the game.
Players fell for that horse, Agro, harder than he expected. “When I was creating Agro, I didn’t think people would end up feeling that way about her,” he said in 2011. And the kills are sad. Before the score existed he put sad music from a film soundtrack over the final blow on the last colossus, and the staff burst out laughing, because they expected a fanfare. After release he asked players if anything about that scene felt off, and they said no.
Then the ending every player of both games remembers. Ico opens with warriors carrying a boy born with horns, a bad omen, to the castle to seal him in a stone coffin. Shadow of the Colossus ends on a baby with small horns. Ueda told Wired News in 2006 that there is “no specific connection as far as a timeline,” that both games exist in the same world, and that the baby was deliberate: “I wanted to give some idea to the player, after you complete the game, that there was a connection to Ico. That’s why I put in the baby with the horns.”
Then The Last Guardian, out late in 2016. Ueda told Famitsu in June 2009, right after its trailer at E3, that a giant living creature was the first idea, and that he wanted the bond the player had with Agro to sit closer to the center this time. The boy is young and weak and the creature, Trico, makes up for it. It was meant to look strange: “We made sure and not make it too balanced.” He said the Japanese name, toriko, can mean a prisoner, a baby bird, and bird and cat put together, tori and neko.
What the hand holds on to keeps getting bigger and harder to steer, and the kid holds on anyway.
The Burning Revelation puts the same reach in one frame. A figure in red, half lost in fire, stretches up toward a pale winged girl lifted between two towering buildings, and their hands don’t quite meet. It is the Ico picture again: a place built far too big for anyone, and a small figure reaching for someone who shines brighter than he does.
References
- James Mielke and Joe Rybicki, “A Giant in the Making,” 1UP, September 23, 2005 (from Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine 97): web.archive.org
- James Mielke, “Bittersweet Symphony,” 1UP, October 2005: web.archive.org
- “The Method of Developing ICO,” 1UP report on Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido’s talk at the Game Developers Conference, 2004: web.archive.org
- “ICO: 2002 Developer Interview” and “ICO: 2011 Developer Interview” (Sony’s Great Scene Sharing event, with Keiichiro Toyama), translated by shmuplations: shmuplations.com
- Jack Yarwood, “The Story Behind Ico’s ‘Terrible’ North American Box Art,” Time Extension, June 21, 2023: timeextension.com
- Griffin McElroy, “ICO and Shadow of the Colossus has reversible boxart,” Engadget, September 8, 2011: engadget.com
- “Behind the Shadow: Fumito Ueda,” Wired News, March 9, 2006: wired.com
- John Tanaka, “Fumito Ueda Talks Trico,” IGN, June 3, 2009 (reporting Ueda’s Famitsu interview): web.archive.org
- Cook & Becker, “ICO, SIE Japan Studio,” official print of Fumito Ueda’s cover: cookandbecker.com
- Giorgio de Chirico, The Nostalgia of the Infinite, dated 1911, Paris 1912–13, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York: moma.org
- Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Drawbridge, from the Carceri d’invenzione, c. 1749–50, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 37.45.3(23): metmuseum.org
- “Ico,” Wikipedia: wikipedia.org