UPDATE: Following comments made by Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton (see below), SCE Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has assured fans that the elusive The Last Guardian is still “alive and kicking in terms of development". In an interview with CVG, the exec added: "If you visit Japan Studio there are lots of people working on it.”
ORIGINAL STORY: Development of The Last Guardian appears to have been temporarily halted, according to comments attributed to SCEA CEO Jack Tretton. Speaking to GTTV about the Team Ico game’s latest no-show at a major industry event, the executive said (via CVG): "The cool thing about our worldwide development studio is we have so many projects from so many teams. Projects never ultimately go away. So The Last Guardian is certainly not going away but it is on hiatus right now."
Little has been seen of The Last Guardian since it was announced at E3 2009 for release on PS3 in holiday 2011. Game director Fumito Ueda later said it had been delayed beyond 2011 "to provide more challenging and better quality of content to users”. In December 2011, Ueda and executive producer Yoshifusa Hayama left Sony, though the former has continued his work on the project as an independent contractor. In February, Ueda said the game remained under his creative supervision and was still in development. Further, he hinted that an official update about the title could be on the way from Sony.
We recently listed The Last Guardian as one of 6 games we expect never to see the light of day, when we noted: “If recent rumors are true, The Last Guardian has been rebuilt as a PS4 game following multiple project restarts. But if it's absent at E3 2013, we're convinced it'll never see the light of day.”
