Spider

Spider (蜘蛛 Kumo) is a colossus that was cut from the final release of Shadow of the Colossus. Its name was given by the developers as it looks like a daddy longleg.

Fumito Ueda spoke about the Spider and his reasons for its removal in two interviews: "Spider was meant to be defeated by slashing it with your sword while riding Agro, but if you're putting in special motions just to take down a colossus, then it's not really elegant. However, the idea of this strategy was used for the turtle (the ninth colossus). I tend to put a lot of emphasis on whether the game design makes sense, whether it's elegant."^[1]

"The concept was great in theory, but difficult to create in practice. We were unable to make it happen during the programming phase."^[2]

Appearance

Spider was a six-legged colossus that was 38 meters high. It had weakpoints on the bottom of each of its legs, and bright talons on its underside. Its head was hexagonal-shaped, with a design similar to a crown. Its face was somewhat simplistic, seemingly only having the stone eyes and four thin slabs for a mouth.

Strategy

According to the artbook, "it was defeated by leading it from water to land". This indicates that the player would've had to lead the boss out of the lake it woke up from, until they reached the main battle area. After that, the battle was simple: Slash the glowing weakpoints on Spider's legs. After the player had hit an unknown amount of them, it would have "destroyed its posture", allowing the player to climb it.^[3]

In the OPM, PSU and E3 demos of the game, Wander had the ability to swing his sword sideways while on horseback, which was the main way to target its legs. This ability would be removed in all later versions.

Location

Spider lived in the unused arena known as Hillock; and while it's located somewhere in the "F" column in the artbook screenshots, it was quickly moved to "D3". The textures from Hillock are mostly found in areas surrounding D3, and one of the hill-like mountains in Geyser looks very similar to the one in the screenshot with the version of Spider with tentacles. The likely scenario is that the 9th colossus got moved from I3 to D3 after Spider got cut, merging both arenas together.

Development History

This colossus was created near the start of the game's development in 2003, and it used to be tested in Stage 12 before being placed on the world map.

The first known design of Spider had long black tentacles on its underside that likely would follow and attack the player. It also had spikes around its feet, and tendons similar to the ones from an earlier version of the 13th colossus on each of its six legs. It was around 20 meters high.

Some time later in 2003, its design would be changed. This new version no longer had the tentacles, instead having bright talons on its underside which generated pulse beams, similar to the early version of the 9th colossus' horns, as well as the ones from the 12th. The talons surrounded a sigil during the period of the screenshots, but it is unknown if this was changed afterwards. The tendon on the legs were replaced with glowing textures, making it easier to tell it was a weakpoint. The size was doubled to 38 meters high.

According to the PS3 Data Sheets, Spider had a unique HUD icon, which is an icon in the shape of the colossus that used to show the weakpoint locations in early builds.

Between the end of 2003 to the start of 2004, Spider was placed on the first seamless map, which was a map that was entirely flat, aside from the copied and pasted cliffs from the "parts library". Spider was temporarely placed next to the himeji bridge in quadrant F1, without making many modifications to the land to include its proper stage.

Later on in 2004, after the shape of the world map was completely changed, and the developers started using a height map to design the lands, Spider's arena was decided to be placed on quadrant D3. There exists no screenshots of Spider beyond this point, but it's assumed that it remained mostly the same during the rest of development. The only difference being Hillock, which was likely more in line with the earlier screenshot of Spider with tentacles, as that was its proper stage.

Spider most likely survived production until sometime nearing the latter half of 2004, much further than both Saru and Griffin, as those were cut at the earliest days of development. The evidence that Spider survived such a long time is that it had a unique idol statue in the Shrine of Worship, as indicated by the PS3 data sheets.

Despite surviving a long time, production on Spider was halted earlier than Sirius, Devil, Phoenix, Roc, and Yamori A, due to Spider being one of the few colossi to not have a volume control sheet in the PS3 data sheets. Besides Saru and Griffin obviously not having such sheets, the others that did not possess it were Worm and the unused last boss, with their production likely stopping around the same time as Spider. Hillock's texture segment also indicates that the arena was very crude, similar to Dune, Worm's stage.

After the world map was reduced at the end of 2004, the 9th colossus was moved to D3, and its arena was merged with Hillock. The only remnant of Spider is now found in Dormin's model, as its six legs are placed on its back.

Trivia

• A texture segment named "spider_pulse_tume" exists in the sheets, while there also exists unused texture segments for a "kame_pulse_tuno" and a "poseidon_pulse_tuno". The word "tuno" is japanese for "horn", meaning those two are likely the bright light which surrounds the horns of the 9th and 12th colossi before they fire pulse beams; in Spider's case, instead of "tuno" there's "tume", which means nail, claw or talon, likely being the ones on the underside of Spider. All of them use the same "kame_pulse_tuno" texture.

• There exists an alternate design of Spider with long, black tentacles coming from its underside. The origin of this picture is from a Famitsu magazine dated December 2nd 2005, and it's likely to be an earlier model of it. Tentacles related to Spider were also found in the sheet data.
• Spider is the unused colossus with the greatest amount of officially released images; it has six different images showing its body or sections of it from various angles.
• An old theory placed Spider at F0, since there was remains of land in the G0 quadrant found in earlier versions of the game. However, at that point in development, several areas in the map had that exact same style, as an early clip from 'F5' available on the Nico bonus DVD, shows the same type of cliffs.

Gallery

	Walkthrough
Characters	Wander  · Mono  · Agro  · Dormin  · Lord Emon  · Guards  · Shadows
Colossi	I  · II  · III  · IV  · V · VI  · VII  · VIII  · IX  · X  · XI  · XII  · XIII  · XIV  · XV  · XVI
Locations	The Forbidden Lands  · Shrine of Worship  · Colossus Arenas
Main Items	Power-ups (Lizards · Fruit) · Weapons (Ancient Sword · Sword of the Sun · Queen’s Sword · Sword of Dormin · Bow & Arrow · Ancient Bow · Harpoon of Thunder · Life Sword) · Collectibles (Relics)
Gameplay	Hard Mode  · Save shrines  · Time Attack  · Reminiscence Mode  · Watermelon  · Barrel
Media	Roar of the Earth (OST)  · Official Art and Guide Book  · Nico Bonus DVD  · Film  · Interview Archive
Releases	OPM Demo  · PS2 original  · PS3 remaster  · PS4 remake  · Credits
Early Builds	Preview version  · PSU Preview version  · E3 Demo
Unused Content	Unused Colossi  · Colossus Test Stages  · Unused Locations  · Beta Mountains  · Development Timeline of Shadow of the Colossus

References