Fumito Ueda – the legendary designer of ICO, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian – has explained what the title of his new game, Gen Atlas, means. And it seems like it carries more meaning than you might think.
“So let’s start with the ‘Gen’ part,” Ueda told our editor Chris Tapsell, via translator, during an interview at Summer Game Fest. “It’s not just one definition or meaning: it has a couple of different word associations. So ‘genesis’ is one, ‘gene’ is another, and then ‘generate’ – the act of generating – is another.
“And then ‘Atlas’,” he added. “I don’t know about you, but a lot of people think [of] ‘the world atlas, the world map’. But it also is the first cervical vertebra here that connects the head to the neck, and as you can see in the robot head design, it evokes that as well. As a whole, I felt like they would compliment each other but also become a word or a title that would capture the entirety of the world that we’re building.”
Gen Atlas was revealed during the Summer Game Fest showcase last Friday, in a trailer that showed a humanoid-sized robot ‘waking up’ in a deserted and silent planet, and then rebuilding and partnering with a colossal, tower-sized robot. Part of that rebuilding process involved flying a head, with its own propulsion engines, onto the skeleton of a huge mechanical husk buried in the sand. From the head we see a dangling mechanical spinal cord, which is presumably the “robot head design” Udea refers to above.
Partnering with another large entity feels similar to Ueda’s previous game The Last Guardian – released 10 years ago this year – in which we buddied-up with a strange Catweagle creature to climb up and out of a towering arena. But the game of Ueda’s Gen Atlas is most similar to his melancholic colossi-hunting open-world adventure Shadow of the Colossus.
“Yes,” Ueda said. “Shadow of the Colossus is the most similar. Not at the level of detail but in terms of the balance between how much action there is and even the scale of things in the world, the adventuring, the traversing you’re going to do, the seamless loading of the environment and so forth. Overall, yes, out of the previous three games, that would be the best in terms of having similarities.”
Gen Atlas is formally billed as a single-player, open-world action adventure. It’s in development at Ueda’s studio genDesign but it’s notably not published by Sony this time but by Epic Games, hence the Epic Games Store exclusivity on PC. Gen Atlas is also coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X.
When Gen Atlas will release is another question altogether; no release date or window were given during the presentation, suggesting it could be far off. Let’s hope we don’t have another extended The Last Guardian wait on our hands.
