Mr. Fumito Ueda at GenDesign HQ. Shortly after he left Sony, another group Team Ico staff also left. Ueda says this led him to join forces with them to give everyone a place to work. “It just felt like it would be a missed opportunity if we all disbanded and didn’t work together again,” he says. From there, the group formed GenDesign and settled on the ‘concept team’ approach, looking to develop game ideas and team up with and oversee others to see those ideas through. Ueda compares it to building a car — saying that GenDesign would be the firm that gets hired to work on the interior design, but not the team on the floor at the manufacturing plant. At the time of our visit in late 2017, that meant nine people in an open office in the same building that used to house Shinji Mikami’s development studio, Tango Gameworks. The team intends to focus on one game at a time — at least, for now — and following our visit, announced it was hiring. The big question for Ueda at this point, he says, is how well a collaboration will work with an external team, or with multiple teams. His theory in setting up GenDesign is a belief that, if he can align with the right partners, he has a better chance of locking in a fully resourced team, since he won’t be part of a large company that can abruptly shift employees around. E3 2018 looms, along with the possibility of a further glimpse at #TheGirlAndTheSleepingGiant (our name for their project) #FumitoUeda #GenDesign #Ico #Nico #Trico #Yorda #ForbiddenLands #ShadowOfTheColossus #Dormin #Wander #Mono #Agro #Colossi #TheLastGuardian #Playstation #InteractiveArt #GirlAndBoy #ABoyAndHisBeast #Shadows #Monsters #CrumblingRuins #GiorgioDeChirico #Piranesi #Fairytale #Sword #Adventure #Horse @fumitoueda