Monday, January 03, 2011

ICO On the Playstation 1 (early version)

ICO On the Playstation 1 (early version)
While going through Unseen 64, I came across this video of an early prototype of ICO running off an PS1 engine. I can't believe what they pulled off using merely PS1 hardware. Lighting and shading here looks amazing for a late-gen PS1 game.
If the game looked this good on PS1 Hardware why the switch to PS2 Hardware? Here's the reason below.
From the wiki page, ((After two years of development, the team ran into limitations on the PlayStation hardware and faced a critical choice: either terminate the project altogether, alter their vision to fit the constraints of the hardware, or continue to explore more options. The team decided to remain true to Ueda's vision, and began to use the Emotion Engine of the PlayStation 2, taking advantage of the improved abilities of the platform.[16][17]Character animation was accomplished through key frame animation instead of the more common motion capture technique.[18] Ico is recognized as one of the first games to incorporate bloom lighting into video games, a feature that is common in later seventh generation console video games.[19] The game took about four years to create.[5] Ueda purposely left the ending vague, not stating whether Yorda was alive, whether she would travel with Ico, or if it was simply the protagonist's dream.[5] ))
I'd love to get my hands on this version of the game and play around with it.  

2 comments:

MC said...

And now it is going to be coming to the PS3. The circle of gaming life.

Semaj said...

I'm probably going to post that early demo for Shadow as well, the one that was supposed to be a direct follow up to ICO instead of a loose prequel.

it is interesting how far projects go when they get an upgrade. There is probably an early demo of MGS 2 with cell shading stored in the offices somewhere.

 
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