SPUDD 64’S TOP TEN FAVORITE VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME: 2

Talented artist and incredible friend, Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64) is counting down his top ten favorite video games. Enjoy!

- Kyle

I should warn you now that there are HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD.

It’s difficult for me to write about Ico. I’ve been thinking about this piece for quite some time now but no enlightenment has come. Maybe it’s best just to share a personal perspective and leave it at that. After all, a game like Ico is best if it’s actually experienced rather than described by someone else. I realize that conflicts with my spoiler warning since I will be giving away much of what happens, but in the end, reading this is up to you.

I remember very clearly the first time I learned about Ico. I was working at a large Barnes & Noble bookstore at the time and we had a big newsstand. I didn’t buy many magazines since I was able to read just about anything on my break for free, but there was an issue of, I think, IGN or EGM or whichever magazine regularly included PlayStation demo discs. Most of the time, these covers were as lurid as they come, with some grotesque CGI image of a laser bazooka wielding soldier blasting away at some alien menace or some scantily clad woman in a martial arts throwdown. This time though the cover was a very simple black silhouette of a horned boy against a silver background. Under the silhouette’s feet were the words “Ico. The best game you’ve never heard of.” It was polybagged because of the demo disc, so I couldn’t read it for free on my break and I had to buy it. I remember reading the article on Ico late at night after work and being absolutely fascinated. Completely entranced by the premise of the game. A game with no health bar, no menu screen, no titles, no items, no display, with very little music, and no clues. If any of you are old enough to remember, some of those concepts were what made the very first Legend of Zelda game on the NES such a colossal hit.

Reading further, I was deeply impressed by the developer Fumito Ueda’s aesthetic for the game. I remember a passage where he described how they chose to depict the sky in Ico. He said something like “When you look at the sky outside your window in the middle of the day, it is rarely completely blue. If anything it is often simply very bright, with elements of white and grey blending with the lightest blue.” He went on to criticize how so many games that were striving for complete realism would always depict the sky as a pure blue which, on a television screen, often makes it look very dark and very fake. And the skies in Ico definitely look like the high summer skies of a hot August afternoon.

So many of the visual elements that are commonplace in games today had their beginnings in Ico such as bloom lighting and minimal design. Ico is probably the first and one of the only videogames that I think can truly be considered a piece of art.

I was so entranced by the article that I spite of the lateness of the hour, I played the demo immediately. I had high expectations but the demo exceeded them all. The game took place in a castle of almost inconceivable vastness in a world of absolutely staggering beauty. The vistas were so powerfully and beautifully rendered that at times I found myself with sweating palms and a gaping mouth, staring, terrified and awestruck by something like a yawning gulf of air beneath my feet or a sheer escarpment of castle wall that loomed for what seemed like miles above my head.

I was thrilled when the game finally arrived on store shelves, although the American cover…



…is absolutely dreadful compared with the beauty of the Japanese cover…



…which is based on the painting “The Nostalgia Of The Infinite” by Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. That painting, and much of de Chirico’s work, resonates very clearly with Ico.

If the demo was a powerful experience, the game itself was almost overwhelming in its quiet beauty. After a prologue where you see a small, sad guard of armed men on horseback taking a small horned boy into the colossal castle and imprisoning him, for reasons never to be known, inside of a giant stone sarcophagus, the game begins. A strange tremor shakes the castle and the sarcophagus, one of what looks like hundreds lined up in rows along the walls, topples ever so slowly and breaks open releasing the boy. Immediately, in the span of just a few minutes of visual imagery and without even a word of narration, you are completely immersed into a strange but very fully realized world. Where is this castle? Why are you here? Why does the boy have horns but the men do not? How often are horned boys taken into the castle? And, after looking at the hundreds of sarcophagi, are they all full of the skeletons of horned boys? So many of these questions are never answered, only hinted at, which gives the game its majesty, power and emotional impact.

Most gamers are very accustomed to pressing some buttons immediately upon the start of any game to call up a menu, get used to the commands, learn how to heal and switch weapons and so on. I confess, I did that right at the start of Ico. There was nothing. Other than learning how to jump, that was it. It took a long time for that to sink in, and the feelings of uncertainty and nakedness were both frightening and exhilarating. Immediately, playing Ico proving to be a completely different gaming experience visually, mentally and emotionally.

Given no clues as to what to do or where to head, it is easy to begin simply exploring the incredibly vast spaces inside the castle.

And the castle is indeed vast. One of the things I remember from that article was Ueda explaining that often in videogames, the player would see some incredible structure or vista far off in the background but would never end up actually moving through that area. He said he made a point of not doing that with Ico and that throughout the game players would still see these incredible parts of the castle but they would eventually and with time get there and see them close-up. I remembered those words very clearly as I moved through the game and saw this…

…and this…

…and this…

…and sure enough, I set my foot on every one of those locations.

Very soon, after a dizzying climb up a spiral stair, you discover a pale, beautiful girl in a cage. It is the work of a moment to free her, and here the story of Ico begins. You see, you are unable to pass through many of the areas of the castle alone, but this girl, Yorda, has some kind of strange affinity with the castle and is able to open paths that the horned boy can not. Although she speaks, her words are given in symbols that are never translated and in this wordlessness Ico becomes almost universal. Each area of the castle is a small piece of a larger puzzle, and you must solve them all while taking care of Yorda, helping her across chasms, pulling her up ledges beside you, holding her hand when you rest, and most importantly, saving her from the terrifying, inky black smoke monsters that seem to dog your footsteps at every turn.

Through it all, a bond grows.

You begin to care very deeply for Yorda, and somehow, slowly, inexorably, almost subconsciously, it becomes clear that the two of you are trying to escape the prison of the castle. However, it’s not just to escape. It’s to escape together.

- Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64)