You may recall back in 2005, during Sony‘s E3 press conference, that the company provided a first look at what the ultra-powerful PlayStation 3 could do. Amongst this demo footage was a truly impressive two-minute glimpse of “gameplay” from Killzone 2, featuring a cinematic experience like no one could’ve ever believed.
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Of course, then the actual game came out and looked different from it, leaving some fans wondering what might have been with the original gameplay footage. Well, here’s the thing – it wasn’t actually gameplay footage.
According to Ars Technica, Guerrilla revealed in its recently released NoClip documentary for Horizon Zero Dawn that the trailer was actually “bullshot” – which pretty much describes fake, touched-up imagery in an effort to sell the game.
Guerrilla executive producer Angie Smets noted that the trailer was made as an “internal vision video about what first-person games could look like for the next generation,” and that it was originally “meant for internal use only.”
Meanwhile, executive Ken Kutaragi thought it would be a good idea to show the trailer off to boost the PlayStation 3 hype. After all, Kutaragi admitted it was running in real-time on PS3 hardware.
To which Smets explained, “We were watching this back home, going, ‘No!’ What did he just say? It’s not true! Then we figured, nobody will believe that, because it’s obvious that it’s all pre-rendered. Then we went online, and we found that lots of people believed it.” Man, talk about pressure.
Smets noted that the first PlayStation 3 kit had “just arrived” by the time the footage aired. “I’m not sure if we had the first triangle rendering (running on PlayStation 3) yet!” she proclaimed.
So, as much potential as the video had for being something spectacular, we just didn’t get that. Still, at least Killzone 2 was pretty good in itself. You can relive the “epic” video below.
Horizon Zero Dawn is available now for PlayStation 4.
