The Last Guardian E3 rumour rumbles again

E3 is right around the corner, and the rumour mill once again pegs Sony's long-in-development The Last Guardian for a re-reveal.

Things kicked off yesterday when The Guardian published its 15 most anticipated games of E3 2015 list - a list that included The Last Guardian alongside the following morsel:

So, The Guardian reckons The Last Guardian will turn up during Sony's E3 press conference next week. We here at Eurogamer have heard the same thing from multiple sources over the last six months, but it's worth noting that The Last Guardian has been rumoured to turn up at each E3 since Eurogamer broke the news in 2011 that creator and Team Ico figurehead Fumito Ueda had left Sony to work on the game in a freelance capacity - and each E3 it failed to materialise.

It's also worth adding that first-party press conferences are built upon shifting sands. Trailers, announcements and developer appearances can be and sometimes are pulled right up to the last minute.

However, a re-reveal of The Last Guardian, first mentioned as in development in 2007, would make sense at E3 this year, given Sony's relatively sparse Christmas 2015 PlayStation 4 exclusive lineup.

Meanwhile, there are rumblings that Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PS4 and director of PS4 launch title Knack, had joined The Last Guardian development to help push the game out the door.

Again, we've heard this rumour a few times from various sources over the past six months, and it makes a lot of sense: Knack was developed by Sony Computer Entertainment's Japan Studio: Team Ico, famed developer of PlayStation 2 games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, is a part of Japan Studio.

Back in 2011, Sony Worldwide Studios chief Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer the development team had run into "technical issues", which had caused delays.

"The team is still working on it very hard," he said. "There are certain technical issues they've been working on. That's the period of time when the game, looking from the outside, doesn't seem to be making much progress. But internally there is a lot of work going into creating the title."

"We had the game playable," Yoshida added. "At one point we felt that it would be produced for a certain time period. That was the time we prematurely talked about the launch window. But it turned out the technical issues are much harder to solve. So the engineering team had to go back and re-do some of the work they had done."

Officially, The Last Guardian is still a PS3 game. That seems highly unlikely now.

It's worth stressing that these rumours remain unconfirmed at this time. We've asked Sony for comment.

All eyes now turn to Sony's E3 press conference. Is it finally the time for The Last Guardian's cat-eagle to spread its wings and soar onto PS4?