in 2009 he expressed admiration for the method of cut-scene story-telling in Valve's Half-Life 2, and when questioned directly expressed an interest in making a first person game. 2010s-present: GenDesign Ueda left Sony in December 2011, although he remained under contract to finish work on The Last Guardian. Around mid-2014, he formed GenDesign (stylized as genDESIGN), made up of former members from Team Ico to help complete development of The Last Guardian. At E3 2015, The Last Guardian was announced for release on October 25, 2016, but was later delayed to December 6, 2016. In September 2018, Ueda revealed that the studio was at the prototyping stage of designing a new game, supported with funding from the investment fund Kowloon Nights. In March 2020, Epic Games announced that they would be fully funding development of it, with the two companies splitting profits in half. In 2021, the new game was teased in one of GenDesign's New Year post cards, which features screenshots from Ueda's three previous games and an unidentified screenshot of a person under a mechanical structure, which is thought to be from the new game. Influences and style He described himself as a very inquisitive child saying "I enjoyed catching and keeping living things, such as fish or birds. Other than that, I liked both watching and making animation. Basically, I seemed to be interested in things that moved." Among his favorite subjects in school was art. He commented, "If I was not in the games industry, I would want to become a classical artist. Though I regard not only games but also anything that expresses something – be it films, novels or manga – as forms of art." Ueda played a lot of Sega Mega Drive games, which influenced his work. He was also a fan of the Amiga computer platformer games Flashback and Another World during his teenage years. Other games that influenced his work include The Legend of Zelda, Virtua Fighter, and Prince of Persia. He was also influenced by the work of Kenji Eno, and the manga series Galaxy Express 999 (1977–1981). Ueda's games are considered to have a very distinctive style, which Ueda himself describes as "design by subtraction", with sparse landscapes, oversaturated lighting and minimalist story to give his games a personal and distinctive feel. Ueda also admitted that, in video games, ideas for a gameplay mechanic should be made first, then