“I’ll always be influenced by that game, probably in ways that I don’t even understand, because it’s definitely one of the pinnacle moments in my gaming career.”
There are two moments in gaming for me that I consider the most important and influential. The first, chronologically speaking, was stumbling over Final Fantasty VI by sheer chance, which made me interested in gaming again after drifting away due to the stagnant period where every other game was a platformer or a beat 'em up with an idiotic story and characters I did not care about.
The other moment was when I played ICO. It completely changed everything I believed about the potential of gaming. It was subtle, it was atmospheric, and it was intimate, all of which were almost unheard of in a medium that was generally hamfisted and simplistic when it came to story-telling. I had never been so angry at an antagonist and I had never been so determined to save a video-game character. That it did this to me without words is flat-out amazing. It was like someone removed a veil from my eyes and told me that gaming could be more, a LOT more than I knew.
There is no doubt in my mind that this little game few people played changed the industry.
