Ueda And Chahi Discuss A Words-Free Approach To Game Worlds At Tokyo Talk
The talk puts a direct line between Another World and ICO's design: Ueda says the holding-hands action came from pushing the protagonist-alien relationship in Another World to its logical conclusion, and that removing words would have been too frightening without it.
Reporting from 1 source: Denfaminicogamer.
At The Tenth Mosaic, held at the Institut francais de Tokyo on September 22 and 23, Eric Chahi and Fumito Ueda spoke on September 23. Ueda said he first played the Super Famicom version of Chahi's Another World as a university student and cleared it with a friend's help, taking from it the idea that it is okay to make a world for the world's sake rather than a world for the game. Chahi said a colleague urged him to play ICO after Heart of Darkness. Both described their words-free style as something they had no choice but to do.
Ueda recalled playing the Super Famicom release of Another World at a friend's house because he did not own the console, and getting stuck just before the ending until the friend helped him finish it. What stayed with him was the idea that a game world can exist for its own sake rather than as a container for play.
Chahi, who has been making games since 1983, came to ICO later, on a colleague's recommendation made after he finished Heart of Darkness. In conversation, both men framed the absence of language in their work as a constraint they worked under rather than a style they set out to build.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.