Ah, 2009. The year Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, and the year Avatar dominated the box-office. It was also the year when Sony officially announced The Last Guardian – designer and director Fumito Ueda’s follow-up to Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus.

For many who played them, Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus were little short of unforgettable. Ico was a platform-puzzler which took place in a lonely, echoing citadel, where a young boy guided a spectral girl through a maze of trapped rooms and corridors. Shadow Of The Colossus was even more ambitious, with its mysterious giants pushing the hardware capabilities of the PlayStation 3 to their limits.

Neither game was a huge financial success, but both have had a huge impact on the industry. Various “are games art?” op-ed pieces aside, the influence of Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus can readily be seen in other games. There’s more than a hint of their fluid mechanics and seamless environmental puzzles in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games, for example, and Shadow Of The Colossus‘ melancholy atmosphere seemed to creep into their most recent title, The Last Of Us. Thatgamecompany’s wonderful Journey also contains a touch of Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus‘ dreamlike tone.

Initially going under the title Project Trico, The Last Guardian is a thematic combination of ideas from Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus. About a boy who befriends a gigantic creature that looks like a hybrid of a cat and a bird (“Trico” being a portmanteau of the Japanese words for bird and cat), the game presents another relationship between player and virtual character, just like the boy and the girl in Ico or Wander and his horse Agro in Shadow Of The Colossus.