Shawn Layden and others on The Last Guardian's 10+-year dev cycle
We talk to six former Sony employees about the long development cycle, the technical challenges, and the move from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4.
At this point in 2025, we’re almost as far removed from The Last Guardian’s release as the game spent in development — which is to say, a long time on both accounts. Fumito Ueda’s third game infamously shipped over a decade after his second, Shadow of the Colossus. And since then, he’s been working on a fourth game, known as Project: Robot, for a similarly long stretch.
“My intention is to always make things as quickly as possible,” Ueda says. “At the same time, I want to avoid releasing something that’s incomplete. That’s why they end up taking longer than planned.”
Over the years, we’ve heard various soundbites about The Last Guardian’s schedule specifically, often in interviews with Ueda and Sony executives like Shuhei Yoshida — the general sentiment being that the team ran into technical hurdles getting the game to run on PlayStation 3, which ended up not being as big of an issue after Sony moved the game to PlayStation 4.
So when putting together our Shadow of the Colossus oral history, I thought it would be interesting to see how others at Sony felt about the extended schedule. Below, I’ve collected those thoughts, which range from laughter over not being able to plan for it to frustration over the game switching consoles.