Fumito Ueda

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Fumito Ueda (上田文人 Ueda Fumito, Fumito Ueda^?) is a video game designer born in Tatsuno, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan in 1970. Ueda is director and lead designer of the PlayStation 2 video games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

He described himself as a very inquisitive child saying "I enjoyed catching and keeping living things, such as fish or birds. Other than that, I liked both watching and making animation. Basically, I seemed to be interested in things that moved." At school, his favorite subjects included art, which still plays an active role in Ueda's life and could have wound up being his career. "If I was not in the games industry, I would want to become a classical artist. Though I regard not only games but also anything that expresses something - be it films, novels or manga - as forms of art."

Ueda graduated from the Osaka University of Arts in 1993

In 1995 Ueda decided to pursue a career in the videogame industry.

His games have achieved popular cult status and are distinguished by a severe economy of plot and scenario, illustrated with overexposed, desaturated light and sparse dialogue. This approach, he described as "design by subtraction," lends his work an existential tone.

Ueda had a spell at the video game developer WARP and worked as an animator on the game Enemy Zero for the Sega Saturn before joining SCE as a first-party developer .

1 Future Projects
2 The genesis of Ico
3 Works
4 External links

[edit] Future Projects

In February 2007 Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu reported that Ueda and his team were working on a new game for the Playstation 3, no other details about the unnamed title were revealed.

[edit] The genesis of Ico

Among other tools, Ueda was an owner of the Commodore Amiga computers (A500 first then A4000). This is uncommon in Japan where this range of computers was not very popular. During these years he learned to use Newtek Lightwave, and eventually the first mock-up and experiment of Ico were created with Lightwave 3D.