‘Ico’ at 25 - The Game That Taught the Industry How to Make You Feel Something
25 years ago today, on September 25, 2001, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan quietly released an action-adventure game on the PlayStation 2 that most of its potential audience completely ignored. But despite its weak sales, Ico ended up becoming one of those rare titles where sales figures and legacy occupy two entirely different universes, and a quarter-century later, it's a legacy that’s only grown exponentially with time.
If you haven’t played Ico, here’s the basic premise: a boy named Ico who was born with horns, marked as cursed by his village, gets locked away in a crumbling seaside castle to be sacrificed. But instead of dying, he escapes his confinement and finds Yorda, an ethereal girl trapped in the castle as well, and the two of them spend the rest of the game trying to escape together while shadow creatures keep trying to drag her back into the dark. That’s basically it. No skill trees, no loot, and a story told almost entirely without dialogue you can understand, since Yorda’s lines are left untranslated on screen. First-time creative director Fumito Ueda built the whole thing around an idea so simple it’s almost embarrassing that nobody had built a great game around it before: you hold the controller’s grip button, and Ico holds Yorda’s hand.
That’s the mechanic that critics still point to as the moment video games figured out they could make you feel something using pure interaction instead of a cutscene. GameSpot’s original review called it out at the time:
“Anyone interested in witnessing the cutting edge of art direction and atmospheric design in games will want to check out Ico. Few games are as seamless, and none are more elegantly bold, from a visual standpoint. Ico serves as a strong testament to the potential of video game aesthetics and boldly asserts that a strong production can indeed drive a game, when it’s coupled with solid play mechanics.”
That’s still correct, and it’s still somewhat rare. Most games try to make you care about a relationship by writing dialogue at you. Ico made you care by making you physically responsible for another person’s safety, over and over, without ever explaining why it mattered. You just knew.
Some of that restraint traces back to Eric Chahi’s Another World, the 1991 cinematic platformer that inspired Ueda’s minimalist instincts, and Ico takes that DNA and stretches it across a full 3D adventure without losing the sense that every visual element on screen is doing exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. The empty stone corridors, the sun-bleached courtyards, the strange silence broken only by wind and the clatter of Ico’s sword against shadow enemies – none of it is padding. It’s mood, and mood was doing the storytelling that dialogue trees usually handle in other games.
Guillermo del Toro has said that Ico and its 2005 spiritual successor Shadow of the Colossus were, at the time, the only games that he considered outright masterpieces, and if that still sounds like hyperbole coming from one of the greatest filmmakers of our generation, it’s worth also remembering how many actual game designers have said the same thing with their own work as the receipts. Eiji Aonuma has cited it as influential on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Hideo Kojima name-checked it in relation to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Jordan Mechner, Jenova Chen, and Neil Druckmann have all pointed to Ico as a formative influence, and you can trace a direct emotional lineage from that hand-holding mechanic straight through to Journey’s wordless companionship and The Last of Us’s Joel-and-Ellie escort dynamic. That’s not a coincidence. That’s an entire generation of designers looking at a commercial underperformer and recognizing that it had cracked something that everyone else had been missing.
The game picked up its share of awards too – multiple Game of the Year nominations and wins at that year’s Interactive Achievement Awards, now known as the D.I.C.E. Awards, for Outstanding Achievement in Story and Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction. None of that translated into the kind of sales numbers that Sony would have liked, but Ico has spent 25 years being the answer to “what’s the best argument that games are art,” a title so frequently cited in that specific debate that it’s basically become shorthand. The only project that arguably surpasses it in that particular conversation is Ueda’s own follow-up, Shadow of the Colossus, which took the emotional groundwork laid here and built something even more ambitious and more heartbreaking on top of it.
Ueda didn’t stop there. After forming his own studio, GenDesign, he spent years finishing his third game The Last Guardian, which came out in 2016 to solid reviews and, predictably by this point, sales that undershot expectations. Three games, one clear artistic throughline about isolated characters finding connection through action instead of words, and a creative director who’s apparently unbothered by the fact that his body of work keeps generating more critical respect than commercial reward. He’s already promoting his next project, Gen Atlas, which suggests that he’s not interested in merely resting on the reputation he’s spent two and a half decades building.
The good news for anyone who’s never actually played Ico is that it’s still available on PlayStation 5 by way of the PlayStation 3 remaster on PlayStation Plus Premium’s cloud streaming catalog. If you’ve absorbed all of the influence secondhand through Journey or The Last of Us or a dozen other games that learned from it, it’s worth going back to the source. It’s a short game by modern standards, and it doesn’t hold your hand in the conventional sense – it just asks you to hold someone else’s.
25 years later to the day, that’s still the entire game, and it still works. Ico proved that a video game could tell an entire story about trust, isolation, and sacrifice without ever explaining itself, using nothing but architecture, silence, and a single button you press to not let go. The industry noticed. The players, eventually, mostly did too. It just took a quarter century and a lot of designers building on Ueda’s foundation for the rest of the world to catch up to what critics were already saying in 2001.