Ico is getting an unofficial Sega Dreamcast port

Homebrew developer Esppiral V is building an unofficial Sega Dreamcast port of Fumito Ueda's 2001 PlayStation 2 adventure game, Ico. It's only in a very early alpha stage right now, so details are scarce beyond eight and a half minutes of test footage.

Even in its rough state, the build covers the game's opening castle spire. Ico climbs chains, runs up stone staircases, triggers environmental switches, and plays through the initial cutscenes as fixed cameras pan to track him.

Esppiral V has made a habit of squeezing sixth-generation heavyweights onto Sega's final console, having previously tested early Dreamcast builds of Final Fantasy X and Resident Evil 4. There's no download link or release window yet, and since Sony Interactive Entertainment hasn't authorized any of this, it's strictly a non-commercial hobby project.

Squeezing PS2 fog into 16 megabytes of RAM

The PlayStation 2 is a much more powerful machine than the Dreamcast, which is going to make this a fascinating port to watch come together. Sony's Emotion Engine CPU and Graphics Synthesizer pushed raw polygon counts and fill-rate effects, like Ico's signature bloom lighting and atmospheric fog, that Sega's 200 MHz Hitachi SH-4 processor and NEC PowerVR2 GPU weren't built to match.

Memory is the nastiest bottleneck. A stock PS2 has 32MB of main RAM alongside 4MB of embedded video memory, whereas a retail Dreamcast has to make do with 16MB of main RAM and 8MB for textures. What remains to be seen from this early alpha is how the framerate will hold up once Yorda's AI and a pack of shadow creatures share the screen with all that castle geometry.

Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in March 2001, six months before Ico even reached North American shelves. Getting one of Sony's prestige exclusives running on the rival box it helped bury feels wonderfully stubborn.

Four years, two consoles, and one terrible box

Ironically, Ico didn't start on the PS2 either. Director Fumito Ueda, who had previously worked as an animator on Kenji Eno's Sega Saturn thriller Enemy Zero, conceived the project in 1997 as a minimalist "boy meets girl" story built around two characters holding hands across a language barrier. Ueda and producer Kenji Kaido began building it for the original PlayStation in 1998 at Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, hiring mostly outside the game industry, before hitting hardware limits two years in and moving development to the PS2.

The four-year production followed what Ueda called "subtracting design," stripping away health bars, inventory menus, and extra enemy types so nothing got between the player and escaping the castle with Yorda. Critics loved it when it launched in North America on September 25, 2001 (followed by Japan that December and Europe in March 2002), handing it three Game Developers Choice Awards. Designers like Hidetaka Miyazaki and Neil Druckmann later credited it as a major influence on their own careers, while Goichi Suda cited its stone-bench save points as the inspiration for saving on a toilet in No More Heroes.

Shoppers mostly ignored it. By 2009, Ico had sold just 700,000 copies worldwide, with only 270,000 of those in the United States, where Sony swapped Ueda's Giorgio de Chirico-inspired painting for what might be the ugliest CG cover art of the decade (and shipped the disc without the two-player co-op mode that European and Japanese players got). Sony eventually bundled an HD remaster with Shadow of the Colossus on the PlayStation 3 in 2011, and it hasn't received a native port on modern hardware since. An unauthorized Dreamcast demake might not be how anyone expected Ico to return, though it beats waiting around for Sony to remember its PS2 catalog.