G
uerrilla Games is now a prestigious 350+ person
PlayStation Studios developer based in Amsterdam, known around the world for the creation of hit sci-fi video game franchises like Killzone and Horizon, but it wasn’t always that way, and its early days were rocky. The studio started life in 2000 as Lost Boys
Games, following the merger of multiple Dutch game developers, and it spent most of its time before 2004 working on smaller releases and licensed games. While everyone got to know each other, and the soldiers of the Interplanetary Strategic Alliance were still just a twinkle in a team of developers’ eyes, was that time a period of healthy experimentation, or did it feel more like jumping from raft to raft and trying to stay afloat? “It was actually a little bit stranger than that. We
came together from three different studios.” says Jan-Bart van Beek, co-studio director at Guerrilla. “We had one group that was completely dedicated to Game Boy Advance that made like a game every six months. We had a team that was working
on the Dreamcast on their own engine. We had a huge team with a background of working on Unreal that then started making their own tech. So it was very chaotic back then. It took us a while to really make choices about the things that we weren’t gonna do in the future. At some point it became clear we had this opportunity with PlayStation to start making the first Killzone, then we really wanted to embrace that and put all these different groups behind this one effort to create success for the studio.” “It was so many different things at the same time - pitching, trying to get publishing deals and funding,” says Michiel van der Leeuw, technical director at Guerrilla. “I remember going on an aeroplane with Martin de Ronde to the UK and I think we were visiting like five or six publishers. They were all in London and we had multiple projects, and were trying to pitch to whichever publisher there was. Eventually Killzone made it through. That was also our most ambitious project I think, and where we sort of fell in love with Sony.” “Halo had already been announced officially,
though it was still an Apple product at that point, adds van Beek. “GoldenEye had a couple of years of big success. Half Life was already out, I think. It was this thing, like, ‘oh, first person shooters are going to be a big new genre’ and they weren’t really on consoles yet. So we asked ‘is it possible to make a first person shooter for the PlayStation 2 platform?’ “The ‘super powerful PlayStation 2’,” says Angie
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