Shadow of the Colossus - Leaked Backstory and Explanation

In my previous video, I talked about the

various cut colossi from Shadow of the

Colossus.

I referenced some of the more recent

leaks. However, I only became aware of

them as I was editing that video. Among

the leaks was a story board dated July

2004, back when the game had 24 colossi.

It details the history of the Forbidden

Lands and offers an explanation of how

Dorman came to be.

In this video, I'm going to read through

the story board and afterwards talk

about some of its inspirations.

[Music]

Before we begin, we must establish how

time works in this land.

Eras of the world is a substitute for

the common era dating system.

This was a way of denoting years in the

wonder universe and it appears to be

mostly equivalent to real life years.

BWE means before world era and we means

world era. It's the same as BC and AD.

A large-scale disaster took place around

this period, sweeping away most of the

known world. The specifics of what

transpired are unknown, but it is

written that this was a natural

disaster. It wiped out most of mankind

and reshaped the local topography,

significantly altering the people's

perspective on their land. The

population bottleneck reduced the spread

of man upon the region from several

million to nothing more than a few

scattered pockets of nomadic survivors

who banded together.

Over the years, the survivors, now

consisting of dozens of thousands of

people, began to scatter abroad.

They split in half with one half heading

towards the northwest and the other

towards the southeast.

The remaining half of the nomadic

civilization journeyed southeastward.

They came upon a plane in the land of

Sinar at the ends of the earth. They

settled there, making it their home.

Back then the earth contained giants.

Powerful men and women of renown among

the nomads encountered these beings in

their explorations of Sinar and were

aruck by the giants and their kind who

came to be known as the colossi.

[Music]

They were biologically immortal and

varied in appearance to affect their

environment.

It was said that these majestic beings

were deities that embodied nature.

And it came to pass that the mighty men

and women were outraged by the colossi,

for they considered them to be

responsible for the great catastrophe

that had wiped out the known world. They

rebelled and waged war against their

kind and called themselves dorman,

meaning insurgent, for they were the

mighty hunters in the face of gods.

The Dorman gathered their people and

forged weapons.

They formed an army and slayed one of

the colossi.

Its blood spilled, marking the land, and

its corpse became a hill of young

sprouts of grass.

They found that with every colossus

whose blood they spilled, it gravitated

towards the first, and so on, and the

hill grew.

The nomads said, "Come and let us build

a great monument from the corpses of the

gods at the center of the land and make

a name for ourselves, reach in the

heavens, and we shall never again be led

astray by the god's catastrophes."

The tower had become strong and tall at

their hands, so they called it the sky

tower.

They built miniature shrines in the

tower's image across the land in places

where the giants had fallen as a way of

mocking them.

The campaign against the colossi was

drawing to an end, and it had passed

that after each kill, the dorman had

deteriorated and become stripped of

humanity.

One day, it was not one of the gods

fallen corpses which gravitated towards

the sky tower, but rather the Dorman

insurgents themselves.

They coalesed and merged into one

another, forming a collective entity

whose likeness was that of the colossi

they slaughtered. And so they came to

believe that they had ascended into

godhood by overthrowing the gods and

taking their place.

They thought that they could rule the

land fairly, ensuring that the people

were never again scattered by any

catastrophes they judged to have come

from the old gods.

The people who had abstained from the

slaughter's numbers now ranked in

millions. They were all struck by the

turn of events, and thus the great

divide took place.

Several clans believed the Dorman had

ascended into godhood through their

deeds. The others deemed the entity and

their likeness as cursed and possessed

by the dead spirits of the innocent

creatures they had slaughtered. And

these people were known as the clans of

the ancients.

Each clan considered the other to be at

odds with their own beliefs. And it came

to happen in the days of the brave

elders that the clans of the ancients

divided. The clans of the ancients

separated from the dormant followers.

Both clans departed from the presence of

the sky tower, building kingdoms and

cities across the land, each after their

own view.

And it came to pass 400 years later that

the descendants of the Dorman followers

infringed upon the peaceful arrangements

of their ancestors.

They declared war on the clans of the

ancients who had rejected the Dorman.

Their conflict was bloody with the death

toll in the thousands.

Finally, elders from the clans of the

ancients gained the upper hand and

defeated the Dorman worshippers.

The elders used runes and magic that

their ancestors had drawn from the

colossi in order to cast away the

Dorman. Up until this point, the Dorman

had remained neutral and watched the

conflict from afar, refusing to

intervene in the matters of those who

they now considered to be merely

mortals.

Infuriated by the elders actions, the

Dorman manifested and attempted to stop

them.

However, the ancients gathered and used

the way of the giants to draw the

Dorman's essence away from its vessel,

rendering it powerless in the process.

And so it came to happen that the power

of the slain colossi was split between

24 great idols.

The power was drawn to statues erected

by peoples across the land.

It also went to the remaining colossi

who had hid from the dorman's wrath

before its birth centuries ago.

The colossi were corrupted with the

dorman's matter.

With the power of the giants who ruled

this land, sealed away in these towering

vessels and statues, it came to pass

that the people deemed the land cursed

by its bloody history of conflict and

disrespect of the natural order.

And so they sealed it away forever,

[Music]

building a great bridge to evacuate the

people from these lands forever.

Now we know the backstory. Here are some

of my thoughts on what could have

inspired it.

The sky tower seems to be based on the

mythological tower of Babel.

The story of its construction given in

the book of Genesis is an attempt to

explain the existence of diverse human

languages.

The Babylonians wanted to make a name

for themselves by building a mighty city

and a tower with its top in the heavens.

God disrupted the work by so confusing

the language of the workers that they

could no longer understand one another.

The city was never completed and the

people were dispersed over the face of

the earth. This is very similar to the

events detailed in the story board. When

reading the story board, I pronounced

the name of the land as Sinar. On

reflection, I should have probably

pronounced it Sinaar, similar to Shinar

from the Hebrew Bible, which is a clear

inspiration.

Shinar was used to describe the land

which includes the cities of Babel,

Eric, and Akad within the kingdom of

Nimrod. Nimrod himself seems to have

been a source of inspiration for this

story. He is a legendary biblical figure

of the book of Genesis.

Described in Genesis as the first on

earth to be a mighty man, he was a

mighty hunter before the Lord.

Extrabiblical traditions identified

Nimrod as the ruler who commissioned the

construction of the Tower of Babel,

which led to his reputation as a king

who was rebellious against the gods.

There is some consensus among biblical

scholars that the mention of Nimrod in

Genesis is a reference not to an

individual but to an ancient people in

Mesopotamia.

All of this is sounding very familiar

and a clear influence on the story

board.

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[Music]