Despite being the “same old” games with a fresh coat of HD paint, HD re-releases tend to need a lot of tweaking and re-development time to get them up and running on new hardware architecture. Couple this with the fact developers have to begin working with old code using methods used to create the old code, and you’ve got a dicey situation. Fortunately, Guerrilla Games was up to the challenge, and have been hard at work recreating the original Killzone in HD, which was originally released on the PlayStation 2.
However, the talented team at Guerrilla Games wasn’t without challenges of their own – one of which was just locating some of the old Killzone code… which was kept in a cellar… in a shoebox.
Guerrilla used a completely different versioning system in 2004, so we knew direct retrieval of the assets was going to be tricky.
The biggest challenge we faced with regard to obtaining the assets was that Guerrilla’s whole way of working was different back then. The assets had been backed up to tape at one point, but that was almost eight years and two tape robots ago. So we needed an archeologist, someone to dig into the depths of our backup archives and unearth whatever they could
The first issue we ran into was that we no longer had a machine to read most of the tapes. And the second issue was that the tapes were stored, uh, offsite… By which I mean, in a shoebox in the cellar of one of our IT support staff members, without a list of contents of any kind.
Normally when I find an old shoebox in my basement, it’s filled with either receipts, or smelly old gym shoes. I’d much rather find Killzone HD. You, too, can find Killzone HD as part of the Killzone Trilogy or released standalone on October 23rd.
