Gen Atlas I have a new trailer at Summer Game Fest 2026reminding everyone that the director of Shadow of the Colossus is working on a crazy new sci-fi adventure for Epic Games. Legendary developer Fumito Ueda isn’t promising a release date for the new blockbuster, but he is promising that his new studio won’t rely on generative AI.
“Everything that is considered game development” is “created by humans,” he told PC Gamer in a statement. recent interview. Presumably this means things like prototyping, concept art, and potentially even code that Gen Atlas will continue to work. Instead, the designer behind classics like Ico And The last guardian said its new studio genDESIGN, which is making the game under a publishing deal with Epic Games, only uses genAI for administrative support. This includes “scheduling” and “summarizing meeting notes,” but not, for example, creating game placeholders.
This apparently distinguishes Gen Atlas games like Crazy taxi And Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantisboth of which arrived on Steam with genAI disclosures on their store listings. “We used it as a reference,” series creator Kenji Kanno said My city via a translator. “So that our artists stop [and] were generating some of their ideas, and then they looked at that generated image, you know, and then they drew the actual thing. So real creators, from programming to assets, everything is created by a real human. It’s only used as a reference so they could look at it and then they would actually create the thing that would go into the game.”
Crazy taxi is an example of a reboot whose flirtation with genAI killed some fans’ hype for the game, although the developers are clearly trying to figure out the line between what they think might be useful for production and what players are willing to tolerate. In Gen AtlasIn this case, it seems like the technology is being used to potentially email staff, but not to get a sense of what the game itself should be like. We’ll see how long it takes to find out what the answer to this question will be. Knowing Ueda’s past history, it might take some time before Gen Atlas is ready for prime time.
