remembers van Beek. “Halo was something that had been developing for quite a long time. It had a lot of hype behind it, and they were making excellent games for Xbox and Xbox 360.’ “At one point


we heard from Edge Magazine, and they were like ‘We’re interested in putting you on the cover.’ We had to source artwork and everything,” continues van der Leeuw. “Then the magazine came out and it had the Killzone artwork and said ‘Halo killer?’ or something, and we were just like, ‘Seriously?’ I mean, the good thing about it was that we had naive ambitions and it made us run. We were a little bit out of our depth because it was so hard to invent everything for the first time. Killzone was maybe not the most polished game, but I’m very proud of it. If you look back at it, we did a lot of things for the first time not just for ourselves, but also for the industry.” “I think internally, we looked up to Bungie,” says


Smets. “We were definitely comparing ourselves. Once that magazine cover came out, that was sort of out there.” Guerrilla was considered a purely first-person shooter


studio for a long while, with some justification, having developed five Killzone games over seven years. Thankfully, after some initial unease, Sony (which had acquired Guerilla in 2005 after the first Killzone released) was soon on board for Horizon and all it had to offer. “I think Sony was initially really surprised that we


didn’t want to continue Killzone, because it was doing fine,” explains van Beek. “Horizon was a very audacious proposition to them. They were like, ‘You really think this is gonna be popular to the audience?’ It’s not contemporary. It’s not a shooter. It’s not a sports game. It’s a fantasy sci-fi mix. There isn’t anything like that. So when they saw it they were like, ‘Oh. Yeah. I guess that this is what you guys are gonna do now.’” “I think we started talking about doing something


different from Killzone during development on Killzone 3,” says Smets. “The flame of Killzone was dying a little bit internally,”


remembers van Beek. “We had told the stories that we wanted to tell and we didn’t really know what to do further with it. There was plenty of discussion on doing


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another shooter franchise, but ultimately, what we felt like we really wanted to do is make almost like a 180 on Killzone. We wanted to do something that was inviting, with characters that had an automatic appeal instead of being very scary or gloomy. Something that was much more hopeful.” “What I really liked was the process that we used. We


basically asked the whole studio to pitch ideas for a new franchise, for new game concepts,” says Smets. “I think we got 35 pitches, with lots of different ideas. There were quite a few recurring themes that JB just mentioned, with the more hopeful tone or colorful worlds. There were still science fiction themes. There was a zombie shooter in there. Lots of robots in all of the concepts. It was a great way to see what the team actually wanted to make.” While the team on Killzone started out with wanting


to make a first person shooter for consoles, the approach to Horizon was different. “With Horizon, it almost started more with the world.


We had this sort of premise. An interesting mystery,” says van Beek, describing their post-post-apocalypse. “We had the idea that this would be basically a robot hunting game, but what exactly that would mean back then wasn’t necessarily clear yet. We always sort of stuck to that original idea of the world overrun by robots, and people inhabiting that. Then we asked what the gameplay that you do is, instead of going from the gameplay and finding a world for it.


ENGINE STRANDING That world and the adventure taken in it was built in the studio’s Decima Engine, rather than in a third party engine used by most of the industry like Unreal. Decima is powerful software that is adapted to the team’s vision rather than the other way around, and it turns out it has quite a lot of history behind it that predates its latest name. “We’ve always had our own engine tech. We never


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