The celebrated video-game designer Fumito Ueda. Photograph Courtesy Sony Interactive Entertainment

In 1994, long before the celebrated video-game designer Fumito Ueda went to work for Sony, he took part in a competition that the company sponsored for young artists. Having made it through the opening rounds, Ueda, then a recent graduate of the Osaka University of Arts, used the thousand-dollar allowance Sony gave him to create an installation in a shopping complex in Yokohama. He set up a small cage, the kind a pet owner might buy for a parakeet, and filled it with mounds of soil. Then he cut claw marks into the bars and positioned a sign in front of the cage explaining that it was home to a subterranean cat. Whenever a mall-goer approached, Ueda, observing from nearby, would push a button on a remote control, activating a pair of motors that kicked dirt into the onlooker’s face. “I wanted to make something that would have more of a lasting impact than a painting,” he told me recently. “I wanted people to go home and find soil on their shirt or in their hair. That would be memorable art, I thought.” For Ueda, who is now forty-six, one lasting memento of the competition is neck pain: he was injured in the final round, when a choreographed street fight that he staged with a collaborator on the roof of Sony’s Tokyo headquarters went wrong.

Ueda’s artistic signature, a combination of cruelty and playfulness, exists equally in his first two video games, 2001’s Ico, in which you play as a young boy helping a waifish girl escape imprisonment in a dilapidated castle, and 2005’s Shadow of Colossus, in which you slay a series of beautiful, moss-covered stone giants. Neither were best-sellers, but, as Chris Suellentrop noted in 2011, they occupy a secure place in the pantheon—cited as masterpieces by the likes of Guillermo del Toro and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, and invoked by tantruming fans in their attempt to convince a skeptical Roger Ebert that video games could be art. Within the industry, too, Ueda’s work is widely admired. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of the exquisite Souls series, once told me that playing Ueda’s début game encouraged him to quit his job at the American tech firm Oracle and join FromSoftware, the Japanese video-game company of which he is now the president.

Ueda’s third major work, The Last Guardian, comes out on December 6th, and it has been one of the most ardently anticipated releases in years. Photograph Courtesy Sony Interactive Entertainment

Ueda’s third major work, The Last Guardian, comes out on December 6th, and it has been one of the most ardently anticipated releases in years. Like Ico, it is a game of collaboration and companionship, set amid the overgrown ruins of a dead civilization. The companion, this time, is Trico, a towering composite animal with the temperament and intelligence of a dog, the ears and nose of a cat, the feet and feathered wings of a bird, and a rat’s tail. Your character, a young boy, clings to Trico’s back as he navigates crumbling masonry, coaxing and cajoling him with treats and caresses. The relationship is redemptive: when you first meet Trico, in a forgotten dungeon, he is chained and frightened, his body pincushioned with spears. In the course of your adventure, as trust and affection build, his wounds heal. He tilts his head inquisitively, waggles his ears, squints with pleasure when you scratch his snout. Like Shadow of Colossus, with its murderous stone giants, The Last Guardian benefits from a washed-out, painterly aesthetic, which gives the game a wistful quality.

Ueda’s latest game was initially slated to be released five years ago. Here, too, it shares something in common with its forebears. Ico, which was originally developed for PlayStation, proved too technically ambitious for the console and had to be shifted to the more powerful PlayStation 2, which launched midway into the game’s production. The Last Guardian, meanwhile, was forced to relocate from PlayStation 3 to its more capable successor. In part, these delays are a function of Ueda’s uncompromising vision and unusual directorial process. When he is working on a new game, he begins by creating a mockup short film, which gives his team an impression of the feelings he wants to elicit but doesn’t get into technical details. “It’s quite different from the other folks pitching game ideas,” he told me. (Blockbuster games, particularly at Japanese studios, are often pitched on paper, in design documents as thick as phonebooks.) Sony, for its part, indulges Ueda’s perfectionism. When asked, in 2015, whether the company would like to work with him on another project, Shuhei Yoshida, the president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, said, “Everyone would.”

Ueda’s own journey has been roundabout. In his final year at art college, he told me, he chose abstract art as his major, figuring that, when faced with a looming deadline, it would be easier to scrawl something figurative than literal. “I also liked that, behind those abstract images, there was always an idea,” he said. “That set me thinking about art in terms of ideas, rather than depictions. What could I make that had a clear idea behind it, looked unique, and yet wasn’t alienating?” Ueda neglected to apply for jobs during his final months of study, as is customary in Japan, so when he graduated he sold his motorbike to fund the purchase of a computer. The machine he chose, the Amiga, had almost no established users in Japan, and the operating system was written entirely in English. Dictionary in hand, Ueda taught himself computer graphics. “It wasn’t my original intent,” he said. “I was interested in multimedia, and using that to artistic ends. It was this exciting territory between full-scale installation and drawing. A new, emergent form. But soon enough I felt like there was something I could discover in or express through the computer.” After working a couple of jobs as an animator, he had saved enough money to quit in order to edit a short film. Just as he began work on the project, Akira Sato, who is now the vice-chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment, offered Ueda a contract. The video he created there laid the template for Ico.

Despite the tardiness of Ueda’s work, the designer, who once said that he dreamed that an elderly, wealthy gentleman would walk into an art gallery, see one of his pieces, and promptly offer him a patronage, has no regrets about his choice of medium. “I was never the kind of sophisticated art student who’d spend their days in museums and galleries,” he said. “Equally, my work never fit the manga tradition. I had to find my place. Video games became the place for me to express my art. It is perhaps the best pairing there could be.”