After a decade of Killzone, Guerrilla Games’ co-founder and Technical Director Arjan Brussee is moving to EA Visceral, creators of another shooter starring glowing eyes, Dead Space.
EA’s newest Executive Producer told Control: “At some point your ‘baby’ has matured, it can stand on its own two feet. The people at Guerrilla are absolute world-class, they can continue on their own.”
In an e-mail to his former colleagues he wrote:
To recall some of those highlights of the past 20 years or so,
In the early 90s, while studying, creating Jazz Jackrabbit, then investing the royalties back in the company and hired Roy (1995) to work on the next IP and Michiel to help out on Jazz.
Our crazy ambitious internal project ‘Core’ (basically a 3D shooter MMORPG) that we never were able to sell (or make).
Merging into Lost Boys Games and signing that Preproduction demo for Sony (famous last words: “sure, we can do that on PS2”).
Then, while growing the company from an attic to a worldclass developer in the best office, along the way getting out from Lostboys, creating Killzone 1 and Shellshock at the same time, actually realising Killzone 2 after that infamous trailer, Liberation as a great handheld title, KZ3 in 2 years, and now back to two great IPs that I’ll sorely miss being part of.
It has been a great ride. Every year there was something ambitious, new and inspiring to put my energy into. For me, I now want to find a new personal challenge, which I hope to find at EA HQ near SF,CA and who knows where this will take me next.
At the start of his career he was Lead Programmer on Jazz Jackrabbit, a game he created with Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski. At Guerrilla he was responsible for all four Killzone games and the PS2 shooter Shellshock: Nam ‘67. •
