Shadow Of The Colossus Director Promises No AI In Gen Atlas

Gen Atlas got a new trailer at Summer Game Fest 2026, reminding everyone that the director of Shadow of the Colossus is working on a wild new sci-fi adventure for Epic Games. Legendary developer Fumito Ueda isn’t promising when the new blockbuster will release, but he is promising his new studio making it isn’t leaning on generative AI.

“Everything that is considered game development” is “made by humans,” he told PC Gamer in a recent interview. Presumably, that means things like prototyping, concept art, and potentially even the code that Gen Atlas will run on. Instead, the designer behind classics like Ico and The Last Guardian said his new studio genDESIGN, which is making the game under a publishing agreement with Epic Games, only uses genAI for administrative assistance. That includes “coming up with schedules” and “summarizing meeting notes,” but not, for example, creating placeholder assets for the game.

That seemingly distinguishes Gen Atlas from games like Crazy Taxi and Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, both of which arrived on Steam with genAI disclosures on their store listings. “We used it as a reference,” series creator Kenji Kanno told Kotaku via a translator. “So our artists would pull up [and] generate some of their ideas and then they would look at that, you know, generated image and then they would draw the actual thing. So actual creators, everything from programming to assets, everything is made by an actual human. It’s only used as a reference for them to look at and then they would actually create the actual thing that would go into the game.”

Crazy Taxi is one example of a reboot whose flirtation with genAI has killed some fans’ hype for the game, despite the developers clearly trying to figure out the boundary between what they think might be helpful for production versus what players are willing to tolerate. In Gen Atlas‘ case, it sounds like the technology is being used to potentially send emails to staff but not to ideate about what the game itself should be. We’ll see how long it takes to find out what the answer to that ends up being. Knowing Ueda’s past history, it could be a while until Gen Atlas is ready for prime time.