Horizon: Forbidden West is set to be one of the biggest games not only of a bizarrely stacked February in games, but of 2022 as a whole. Sequel to critical and commercial smash Horizon: Zero Dawn, it shows all the same qualities of its 2017 ancestor – a unique setting, scarcely believable visuals, satisfying mecha-dino takedowns – and looks to build on them in a way that will have us all alternating between gasps of delight and triumphant muscle-flexible before an imaginary audience recently wowed by our feats.
The studio behind it, Holland-based Guerrilla Games, has a history that goes back well beyond Horizon. Well beyond Killzone, in fact – to a collective of developers in the mid-nineties experimenting with platforming games and featuring some of the talent behind… Jazz Jackrabbit. Humble beginnings indeed.
That collective of developers was formed by Orange Games, Digital Infinity, and Formula Game Development. Orange Games was established in 1993 by Arjan Brussee, co-designer of the aforementioned Jazz Jackrabbit and its sequel. Digital Infinity’s output has been lost in time, but there’s at least the record that it was formed in 1995 by Arnout van de Kamp. Formula Game Development’s portfolio is, similarly, a mystery. It was formed in 1998 by Martin de Ronde and sold to Lost Boys a year later.
Although records are scant for this period of Dutch game development, there had already been a significant industry in the country there for over a decade by the point of Guerrilla’s very beginnings. Nijmegen Adventure, by Wim Couwenberg, released in 1980 and offered a text adventure for the Commodore PET and 64. Throughout the ‘80s, homebrewed titles found small audiences in Holland, including the wonderful Oh Sh*t! – an unabashed Pac-Man clone that simply adds digital speech to the game and makes the ghosts voice the eponymous exclamation when the player catches them.
By the ‘90s, not only were Dutch developers working at high-profile appointments like Epic Megagames, but also on the Zelda license. 1993’s Zelda: The Magic Wand of Gamelon isn’t remembered as a particular highlight of the storied series, but its nightmarish animated cutscenes for the CD-i have at least provided plenty of meme-fodder in the intervening years.
The three studios that would one day become Guerrilla merged on the first day of a new millennium – Jan. 1, 2000. Now under the Lost Boys Games banner, the studio worked on titles such as Big Brother: The Game (not remembered quite as fondly as Aloy’s exploits, it’s fair to say) and grew from 25 employees to 40.
Also at this point in the studio’s development, current head of Sony Worldwide Studios Hermen Hulst joined the company, replacing de Ronde as managing director in 2001.
Outside the walls of Lost Boys Games, Dutch game development was continuing to grow. Two Tribes released Toki Tori in 2001, a platform-puzzler you’ll still find some people talking about in reverent, nostalgic tones. It was during this period that Lost Boys Games focused on mobile gaming, releasing two titles for the Game Boy Advance and two for the Game Boy Color between 2001-2002.
Then, in 2003, Guerrilla Games as we know it was formed. It came about through a complicated series of parent company rebrandings and takeovers orchestrated by Lost Boys owner Michiel Mol. With the ink still drying on the company’s signs, it began work on its two most ambitious projects yet, a pair of shooters that would change the trajectory of Guerrilla and see Sony come knocking: Killzone and Shellshock: Nam ‘67.
While Killzone was earmarked as a Sony-published title, Shellshock was made under Eidos’ stewardship. One took the FPS format to a new, whole cloth sci-fi setting, while the other gathered together all of pop culture’s favorite Vietnam War movie tropes and threw them into a shooter. In the end, neither game hit the mark with critics. Shellshock was criticized for its sensationalist depiction of the conflict and slipped out of public consciousness fairly soon after it arrived. Killzone, on the other hand, faced criticism more technical in nature. Graphics glitches, bugs and performance issues put a hurdle between players and an enjoyable, challenging and dark shooter.
But it didn’t stop it. There’d been a huge amount of what we might now call hype for Killzone before release, and that tide of excitement overcame the bugbears. Over a million copies were sold, and that was enough to get Sony to draw up a first-party contract for Guerrilla, ensuring that from 2004 onwards all the titles it developed would appear only on PlayStation consoles. The deal meant that when Horizon: Zero Dawn released on PC in the summer of 2020, it was the first Guerrilla title to make it to that platform since Shellshock: Nam ‘67 in 2004.
From this point until Horizon in 2017, Guerrilla would be focussed solely on Killzone titles. It faced a now-infamous backlash upon Killzone 2’s release when fans decided the finished game didn’t look like the version they were shown in an E3 gameplay demo. It might therefore hold the dubious honor of being gaming’s first downgrade controversy. Despite some furrowed brows and shaken fists, Killzone 2 went over well with critics and eventually sold over a million copies.
Killzone became the franchise for showing off what PlayStation’s next hardware was all about. PSP spinoff Killzone: Liberation took the shooter into isometric dungeon crawler territory for the sake of portable convenience, Killzone: Mercenary found uses for the touch panels of the PlayStation Vita in a shooter format, and Killzone: Shadow Fall showed us what the PS4 was capable of on a technical level: huge levels filled with high fidelity assets, loading on the fly.
Let it never be said that Guerrilla didn’t find new ground for Killzone during these various console outings, or that it didn’t feel enjoyable to shoot some Helghast. Hand on heart, though, even diehard fans might pause momentarily before arguing the premise and the universe had six games’ worth of exploration in them.
Horizon, on the other hand, has a different atmosphere entirely. It’s a world bearing the scars of a mysterious lost civilization, a far future that looks like a distant past, and it’s just about hospitable that you can exhale and take in the scenery now and then. This was never the case in Killzone. Nor were the latter’s characters especially memorable, despite some convoluted double-crossings and a series-long penchant for surprise protagonist killings that would have made the Call of Duty writers’ room proud. Aloy’s journey through Horizon showed a different side to Guerrilla – soft-touch storytellers and exceptional world-builders, as well as masters of squeezing the most out of PlayStation hardware and making a headshot feel just right.
Horizon: Forbidden West will be only the studio’s eighth game as Guerrilla Games, and only its third outside the Killzone franchise. Its next announced project, a VR title co-developed with Firesprite called Horizon: Call of the Mountain, is in many ways the perfect example of what the studio’s about: a deepening of a universe it created itself, making fortuitous use of a Sony hardware platform. Meanwhile, anyone waiting for that Shellshock sequel might have to be patient.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
