Can Horizon find a place on the big screen?

This week at CES, Sony revealed that it’s adding even more video games to its already considerable list of adaptations, including Guerrilla Games Horizon franchise. After a planned Netflix series collapsed after allegations of abuse against showrunner Steve Blackman, Sony decided to turn it into a full-length film.

Among the PlayStation’s first-party line-up, Horizon occupies a strange place. Although its two main games appeared to sell well, the series earned a bit of an online reputation as an “industrial plant”, bolstered by PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst, who previously ran Guerrilla while making Horizon Zero dawn. There’s also just been a general pushback against Sony’s efforts to evolve whatever he can in franchise and Horizon certainly making moves to expand. Along with a third single-player game in development, there was The call of the mountain VR game, at least two rumored multiplayer spinoffs — one cooperativethe other an MMO— and last year’s double whammy of a spinoff lego game and a re-release of the first game for the PlayStation 5. Next to Naughty Dog’s the last of us it might be PlayStation’s most persistent franchise in terms of frequently reminding you that it exists, and if you know how people feel about this franchise’s tendency to not go away, you’ll know that’s far from a compliment.

Horizon has always been an odd duck, much of which can be attributed to when it exists. Previous first party PS titles like God of War Ragnarok or Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 they came out amid busy periods, but at least they had the potential to carve out a niche of their own. Seeing promos of Kratos and Atreus facing off against a wolf or the two Spideys doing the same with Venom made you want to make time for them. PlayStation makes hit games and these two titles, plus the last of us grab your attention, as blockbusters often do, whether they come out in the summer or at Christmas. To Guerrilla’s credit, both from the core Horizon games tried to garner similar attention, only to have their impulse completely, hilariously undercut.

Zero dawn released in February 2017, just three days before the launch of the Nintendo Switch Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The impact of this game can only be described as meteoric, both for Nintendo and the industry as a whole. Breath of the wild changed the way critics and players looked at games from this particular franchise, and open-world titles in general, and dominated much of the conversation in 2017. Look forward to 2022, Guerrilla is released Horizon Forbidden West, which was released just a full week before Elden Ring. like breath FromSoftware’s gothic roguelike changed the game that people kept talking about, in turn sucking all the oxygen out of the room. It helped that From’s profile grew in 2010. thanks to Dark souls games, 2019 Ax: Shadows Die Twice, and a small PS4 game named Bloodborne.

So yeah, things weren’t always in there on Horizon instant favor, and it can sometimes feel like it’s a step or three behind its open-world counterparts or RPG contemporaries. But the games are good in their own right. Zero dawn and Forbidden West both were fairly well received critically and commercially, and if anything, their ability to endure despite being overwhelmed by the larger competition may have endeared them further to players. This series isn’t really an outsider in the PlayStation pantheon—an honor that, depending on who you ask, it might get Gone are the days– but managed to feel like one in part because of how different it is from its first-party peers. In 2017, the then recent Uncharted 4 and newcomers like God of War or Marvel’s Spider-Man there was a built-in audience that had some idea of ​​what to expect. Horizon was a notable departure from Guerrilla, who spent the late 2000s and early 2010s on their streak of Killzone shooters, so the spin from military sci-fi to a lush post-apocalypse caught the eye.

It always has something fascinating about Horizon this clearly resonated with audiences even as the series continued to enter Local and local appropriation. Perhaps it was the appearance of robot animals either the fun of taking away their points or it was the games throw away more fools (but still quite logical) twists to their stories. It could also just be series lead Aloy, who debuted just as the triple-A developers were starting a new, ongoing (and increasingly diverse) wave of major games led by women. It took almost a whole decade and public criticism of E3 2014 for studios to make games with more women is…extremely depressing, but whatever, that’s how things shook out. Guerrilla gave the PlayStation a first-party franchise driven primarily by Aloy’s relationships, both platonic and romanticwith women of all stripes, and that approach has since become part of the triple-A playbook.

With a solid amount of general goodwill on Horizon managed to accumulate, cashing in on that makes sense. But there are challenges facing these various projects, namely the growing risk of ongoing multiplayer games and Sony’s tendency to interfere with its own movies. So far, the series has withstood two major gaming competitors, but those are different beasts compared to an entire genre slowly closing in on himself or parent company reducing plans before that (i strongly) set in stone. No matter how things shake out, can we at least no will Guerrilla get caught in a loop where they’ve been remastering and remaking games for half a decade? Please?

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