Previously in the series: The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 2, The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 1, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 2, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 3,The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 2,The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 2, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Hermen Hulst, Part 1
The first Killzone game was dubbed a Halo-killer but my talk with Hermen Hulst reveals that Bungie’s Xbox game wasn’t even on the minds of the Guerilla Games dev studio. Learn about the origins of the Playstation 2’s premiere FPS and more in part two of my talk with Hulst.
So, after signing the contract for what was then Marines, was there a sense internally at Guerrilla that, hey, we’ve got to knock this out of the park? This is our big shot. We are going to be on the PS2, which is the hot console now. What was the mood as you guys entered into the development stage for what wound up becoming the first Killzone?
We had shown a tech demo, basically on the back of the old technology that Orange Games, one of our predecessors, had developed. It had some great rendering technology. Time is not very friendly, looking back at it now, but it was “wow!” 10 years ago. Things have evolved. But, for back then, it was really state-of-the-art technology, and we as a studio needed to develop a game around that technology. So, that was a massive learning experience for us. We capitalized on something that we were naturally strong at–because of the quality and backgrounds of our founding members– very tech savvy, very graphics savvy. And not surprised that those became key pillars for the Killzone franchise and for Guerrilla as a studio.
Taking those technological strengths and then developing compelling concepts, designs, and great gameplay, that was our focus. Working with Sony very early on gave us a lot of credibility to help us become a very international studio. We currently employee, I think, 23 different nationalities. We already had that very international DNA from the early start, and we were able to recruit people from outside the Dutch community. The hiring pool in the Netherlands was very small, because there weren’t any other proper game development companies at the time, either domestic or from other countries. So working with the market leader that just had the hot new console out was a massive thing for us. That put us on the map frankly.
Was the pitch for Marines more of a standard military game? I’m inferring that from the name. And at what point did you decide to make it the kind of sci-fi epic universe that Killzone became?
Marines was more of a demo and it was essentially Killzone without the Helghast. For the standards of the year 2000, it had great rendering technology, pretty good visuals, fluid animations, and then. Making it sci-fi came later, and it’s the kind of sci-fi that’s grounded in reality, which is a little different than most sci-fi. Having it centered around the Helghast was a pretty conscious decision. What we wanted to do is create a game that wasn’t so much based on a hero; pretty much any other video game did that at the time.
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We thought it was very interesting to approach it from the other side. So we were looking at creating a very compelling enemy, that again, allowed us to show off great graphics, but also take a very different approach. Less cliche. I guess, we were inspired in a way by Aliens, that took a similar approach. So, that led to the Helghast, and obviously we evolved a very deep and massive universe and back-story around that.
So, you’re saying that was all part of the initial pitch? Like you knew you wanted to do something more science-fictional and something centered on the enemy from the beginning?
No. That was kind of being developed in parallel. That was certainly not in the demo. So that demo was a tech demo, it was definitely going to be a first person game, and it was going to be a shooter. but the bigger premise of Killzone as a franchise, as a game, that was still being developed. As you can imagine, that took us a number of years because we released it in 2004.
What was the challenge in debuting Killzone 2 on the PS3? Because you must have had to revisit the technology that you used for Killzone, and things had changed, obviously. You have Blu-ray, you have the change in online infrastructure. What were the challenges you guys faced in making Killzone 2 for the PS3? And how did Sony help you meet those challenges?
That’s a great question. We at Guerrilla had a very specific set of challenges. We had actually started development for Killzone 2 to initially be on the Playstation 2. That’s a title that was never released and probably not too many people know about that.
I’d never heard that. That’s a big surprise to me.
Yeah. I just shared that a couple weeks ago for the first time, really. But at that same time, since we were working with Sony so closely, we understood what they were doing, and we had good access to their plans. We jointly, with them, worked on a very visionary trailer for what our franchise would be capable of doing on the new console, the Playstation 3. So we developed that now-infamous E3 2005 Killzone 2 trailer, which was originally intended to be an internal benchmark for what we wanted the team to focus on and to drive towards.
Because it was so well-liked, Sony had chosen–and I was fine with it at the time–to use that at the presentation of the PlayStation 3. If you Google that, and you go back, you find that there was a lot of controversy around that. Was it possible? Was it real? Was it not? We all know now that it was a trailer.
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Right. Pre-rendered, that didn’t necessarily reflect the game engine….
Motion video that was pre-rendered. But still, we knew that was possible. I think, looking back, it’s fair to say that we delivered that experience. All that detail, all that intensity in the combat experience, all the animation quality… looking at the specs early on, we felt that it was possible to realize that. And I think the role of Playstation was–and huge kudos to them as a publisher–they believed we could do it. They helped us see through to the moment in February 2009, when we finally actually released that title. And it was a massive undertaking for a very young team. Still a very rookie team when we started working on that in 2005 to pull that off. Everything had to be created from scratch. A brand new engine had to be created. Different animation technologies. Everything. Literally, everything had to be built up from scratch. And the role of the publisher is, I guess, not only funding it but also believing that you can do it, and not shying away when it takes longer than expected. But believing in that vision and agreeing jointly with the developer, that it’s the right thing to do. Especially when it’s a rookie team as we were back then.
You mentioned the belief part, and that seems like it’s so important, because you guys have taken a fair amount of time in between installments. It’s been about, I think, five years between each? This next one is coming faster after Killzone 2, but still it’s….
Yeah. It’s four years. We actually had to can Killzone 2 for Playstation 2. If you look at that, it was actually about three years and about 10 months, I think. So pushing four years. And with Killzone, we were setting up a studio back then. We were merging teams. There was just a lot of organizational stuff and recruiting stuff, and setting up teams, and deciding what technology, and pitching to publishers, because we were working with many different ones at the time. So that’s understandable when you’re starting out. Killzone 2, the four years had to do with the sheer ambition of the product, and also the young team working against the expectations.
The challenges were both good and bad. At the end of the day, that’s all great because the experiences pushed us. There was no way back. We had to deliver what we had communicated externally. You’re right in saying a show of faith matters. Killzone 3 is going to be done on a two-year-cycle, and that has to do with the fact that we’ve grown enormously as a team, as a studio. We have a fantastic foundation now to build on. But I guess, most importantly, we have a very experienced team now. For the first time we’re commencing a huge game that’s more ambitious than anything we’ve done before, but we’re doing it with a team that is intact. All the key players have been here now for 8, 9, years. And we’ve been able to do some really focused and targeted recruitment for some key roles. So we got a great team in place and we can actually now properly compete with some of the bigger teams out there.