the disc ... and then the power went out in the centre of Amsterdam. Some people had already gone to a local grocery store to get crates of beer because it was a Friday evening. We were standing there, we were already drinking beer. Suddenly, there’s no power. We had to actually call Sony and say ‘I’m sorry you’re not going to get your milestone deliverable because the power went out.’ It sounded like such a lame excuse but it was a very legitimate explanation.” “Sounds like ‘the dog ate my homework!’” laughs
van Beek. “Even back in those days, I think the relationship with
Sony was always quite good. Thankfully, over the years that only got stronger,” says Smets.
Smets, head of Development Strategy at PlayStation Studios, cheekily. “I remember you actually calling me when the deal was signed with PlayStation. You were super excited, and were like, ‘It’s gonna be on PlayStation 2’. Then you told me to come and help. I was so impressed because the PlayStation 2 at that time was by far the most powerful machine you could imagine as a creative.” “They were advertising it as military grade hardware.
Because it had maybe a gigaflop. That made it military specs,” laughs van Beek. “It was a great machine. Hard to program for, I
think,” muses Smets. “That was our first big console game. I guess we were sort of blessed with ambition and confidence and being super naive at the same time. I remember you saying, ‘Other people make games for PlayStation. Why can’t we do it?’ “I think we worked a little bit too hard. We were like,
‘Yeah, we really need to get better at this making games thing.’ We want to keep doing this. It needs to be easier. We need to get better at the whole process.” “We also had so many logistical things
to worry about that now aren’t a problem anymore, like sending builds in the mail. On a Friday night, you had to send your milestone builds to the publisher. Your deadline was very physical, because some person was going to show up at your door and take a disc and send it to your publisher. Making a build took like an hour and a half. I remember stalling the courier to make sure that the physical disc could finish burning,” says van der Leeuw. “We once had a very important
milestone build that we were very happy about. We were done and getting everything wrapped up and had to burn
18 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2023
HALO KILLER? Killzone made an immediate splash for mindshare of the PlayStation 2, stepping into the spotlight at E3 2005 with an impressive trailer that made a lot of other console shooters of the time simply look like they didn’t know what they were doing yet. Others would say that Killzone was the PlayStation 2’s answer to Halo, which had been released around three years earlier on the original Xbox. But was that ever said internally? Did the studio ever feel pressure from their publisher to beat Halo? “It wasn’t said internally, but it did just appear on a magazine cover. It was suddenly so important and we were all like ‘Really? What?! We’re not making anything like Halo. We’re making something completely different,’” remembers van Beek. “Bungie were a very well renowned company of
veterans that knew what they were doing,” says van der Leeuw. “We were a bunch of youngies trying to act like a game company. We had no experience.” “They had already shipped Marathon at that point,”
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