![]() And with us, the world of Horizon has also grown. Our studio’s grown from those early scrappy days to a massive group of hundreds of talented developers. But during production, we were growing so much as a team and as a studio.Īt one point, it was pretty clear we’d outgrown our beloved, almost-collapsing, canal-house office on the Herengracht we had to have two diesel generators craned in because the building’s infrastructure just couldn’t support all our machines as well as air conditioning. I think you can see that hard work in the excitement from fans since the launch. With Forbidden West, we looked at every aspect of the first game and improved it. Since Horizon Zero Dawn, our journey with Aloy has grown. Hermen looked at me with a big grin and as he stepped into the event hall said, “Well, too late to worry about that!”Īs the trailer played, we were glued to the live reaction – and totally floored by the passionate response. As we were waiting in line to get into the 5000-seat hall where PlayStation events were held, I turned to Hermen and said, “What if it doesn’t work? What if the whole idea of cave people fighting robot dinosaurs is just too silly?” Behind the scenes, we had been secretly working on Horizon Zero Dawn for several years – but now we were going to show it to the world. The first sign that we might really have something was when Hermen Hulst (then managing director of Guerrilla, now head of PlayStation Studios) revealed the first trailer. Once you show it to the world, will people like it? Will they hate it? When production ended, even though we were proud of what we were creating with Horizon Zero Dawn, we all felt that sort of anxiety. ![]() And we wanted an iconic franchise-worthy protagonist. Horizon itself really came from a visual idea of these primitive tribes, fighting to survive in a lush landscape dominated by great machines, long after the collapse of our current civilization. We knew it had to be incredible, stunning, and hopeful. We asked the team what they wanted to make. Essentially, we opened the floor to the team. The whole story of how Horizon came to be is (flatteringly) covered in a Noclip documentary. But we were feeling the itch to do something new, unlike anything we’d done before. We had been developing Killzone successfully for almost ten years, and putting that aside was obviously a little scary. A new generation for Guerrillaīy the time we released Killzone Shadow Fall (2013) for the PS4, we were at a turning point. But it only pushed us into wanting to spread our creative wings, staying true to the motivation of our early years. We navigated what it meant to be a first-party studio for Sony, growing and having visibility on the global stage. This period was truly one of growth for us at Guerrilla in every sense. We experimented with the latest tech, like the PlayStation Move motion controllers, and we expanded the world of Killzone into handheld experiences. They were really supportive of our creative visions, and their new technology was, as always, best-in-class. It’s nice to see it considered a ‘classic’ of that generation – even if it makes me feel a little old reading that back.Īround when the PlayStation 3 console was launching, we became a first-party studio for Sony. By that point, we knew what we were doing a little bit more, and Killzone 2 raised the quality bar for us. By this time, consoles were taking the world by storm, and PS2 players especially. ![]() It wasn’t long until we jumped to work on the sequel. Killzone’s gritty galactic war captured the imagination of gamers, and we were proud of having made a mark in the industry and having developed a first-person shooter for Sony. Unexpectedly, our small studio was quickly catapulted to the global stage. I think it’s clear that’s still in our DNA – in Decima, especially.Īs Guerrilla, we made a lot of work for ourselves right off the bat, creating 3D immersive games with Shellshock: Nam ‘67 and Killzone. It was a time of experimentation, and it was exciting to be at the forefront of innovative, interactive technology. So, when the opportunity came up to create these new experiences that push boundaries and steer the industry, we grabbed it with both hands. We were called Lost Boys, we were scrappy, maybe flying by the seat of our pants a little, but we were also ambitious. Meanwhile, we were working hard in the Netherlands – some of us making Game Boy Color games. People were losing their minds over the technological feats being achieved with all the power it offered (six whole GFLOPS!). The PlayStation 2 had launched three years earlier to critical acclaim. The year we formed Guerrilla, 2003, was an interesting time for gaming. ![]()
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