Exactly four years after The Last Guardian was first announced at E3 2009, Sony CEO Jack Tretton has confirmed that the publisher has officially put Team Ico’s long-overdue PlayStation 3 title “on hiatus.”
Tretton made the sad (but expected) announcement about The Last Guardian‘s status in a Game Trailers interview this morning, saying:
“We got so many projects out there from so many great teams, projects never ultimately go away. So The Last Guardian is certainly not going away, but it’s on hiatus right now.”
The last official update we had on Team Ico’s follow up to their 2005 PlayStation 2 classic Shadow of the Colossus, was from a February 2013 interview with Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida. In that interview Yoshida stated that the company was “not ready to talk” about The Last Guardian, and that they were “waiting for the right time to reintroduce” the title.
Earlier that same month the game’s design, Fumito Ueda, confirmed that the title was still in development, and that he was still heading up the project. Ueda added that fans should “please keep an eye out for their [Sony] announcement.”
With today’s confirmation that The Last Guardian is officially on hold, it appears that fans will have a long wait ahead of them before Sony is ready to reintroduce the game.
[Update] Sony’ head of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, has revealed to Kotaku that The Last Guardian is not “on hiatus”, but is still in active development.
“That hiatus term—I’m not a native English-speaking person—but that’s misleading. The game is in active development. [Lead designer Fumito] Ueda-san shared updates a few months ago. Nothing has changed. My answer is, ‘Yes, the game is in active development.’ It’s not hiatus at all. But we are not ready to reintroduce it. When we are ready, we will do that. Please wait.”
