He showed a video of a tech demo, featuring space marines, that it showed Sony in 1999; it didn't look bad for a 1999 tech demo. It impressed Sony and the rest, as they say, is history.
[...]
Seriously though, he came across more as an old indie guy. He stressed how Guerilla's transition, from indie studio to Sony-published and then to Sony-owned allowed it to keep its culture. Interestingly enough, ex-Westwood hero Louis Castle had a talk earlier today about how you will always have to adapt after acquisition. But Hulst did create some confidence by talking about how it first looked at Gran Turismo developer Polyphony and Uncharted dev Naughty Dog and how they dealt with being owned by Sony.
On the Killzone side, he had some more interesting things to discuss. Guerilla apparently created a method which he dubbed "top-down and bottom-up." (He is so Dutch.) This consisted of analyzing all reviews of Killzone 1 and "all forum posts", which resulted in average scores, what was wrong about the first game, and what was good about it. It then took the top five best and worst elements and made it the objective to turn the worst five into highlights for Killzone 2. In a second analysis after Killzone 2's release, it turned out that three awful aspects of Killzone 1 (AI, death animations and cover) were now seen as being great in Killzone 2.
The studio did the same thing with Killzone 2, compiling a list of some of the game's most negative aspects as perceived by gamers and critics.
[...]
Finally, Hulst announced that Guerilla is starting up a new studio (in Amsterdam's downtown area) which will develop an as-of-yet-unannounced new IP. They are hiring, so get on it.
