12 years at Guerrilla Games

Interesting day to celebrate 12 years at Guerrilla Games. So many memories. From the trenches of Killzone 2, 3, Shadow Fall, to Horizon Zero Dawn. To all the intense moments, working late, with the ever grown family of Guerrillas. To growing personally, professionally but as a group of people collaborating on that complex tension triangle between Creativity, Technology & Business. The future is looking ever changing. Caught another glimpse of it today.

12 years ago, i had recently come back from my internship with Jamey Scott in LA. I was in my third year of Music Technology at the HKU. I got an email from Mario. If I was interested to come work for Guerrilla. Help them ship Killzone 2. At the time, the audio team consisted of him and Lucas. Both had started working there only the last year or so. They were gearing up for the 2007 E3 trailer, the one with in-game footage 😉 Of that bloodgracht single player section. I was so blown away with the atmosphere. How much everybody wanted to be there. I remember my interview was days post E3 and Lucas went on a holiday, after that I could start. It was supposed to be my graduation project. 6 months. But Killzone 2 needed a bit more time so Rens Machielse arranged that I could complete my studies and work at Guerrilla at the same time. It was amazing.
We worked our asses off, looking back it’s incredible what that team pulled off n that game I think. 
Next year this rock band is moving its show to a 5 story studio, next to the palace, it sure seems like this 6 month wrap up a game is turning into a somewhat significant portion of my life. Woei. Cheers folks!

Here’s one for my GG fam!

Zen and the art of GameAudio maintance – on the GDC vault

 

At this years Game Developers Conference in San Francisco I was invited by Damian & Scott Selfon to give a talk on the Audio Bootcamp track. Quite a special thing since this was the room happening the very room at the moscone centre where my career started. After my internship in LA with Jamey Scott ended in 2007 I went to GDC and met all these amazing people, my tribe, in the gameaudio community.  Back in 2014 I already got to do a talk there with Andreas Varga about the sound system of Killzone Shadow Fall but this time I was on my own.

I wanted to talk about my experience in gameaudio and share some insights about the experience of working on games such as Horizon. And give some practical lessons learnt from that time. Inspired by Robert M. Pirsig’s writing.

Now the recording of the talk is available free of charge at the GDC vault.!