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Remembering Killzone

How strangers came together to celebrate Killzone's 20th anniversary.

Jimmy Bowers

10 Sep 2025 — 9 min read

We've all got a specific game or series that's still languishing on older hardware that we'd love to see brought to current-gen systems, if only so our cherished rose-tinted memories can be smashed into a fine paste. With remasters and reboots having a real moment in 2025 (looking at you Metal Gear Solid Delta and Gears of War Reloaded), the likelihood that we'll be able to play a new, shinier version of our favourite games is better than it's ever been.

My personal cross to bear is Killzone. I'm such a flag-waving apologist for the whole series. Every State of Play I'm there...willing a re-release into existence (not hard enough, clearly). For many, Killzone is a brown-coloured PS3-era shooter they half remember being not as good as Halo. However, to me, it's a cornerstone of my video game journey. Growing up, the consoles and games I had access to largely depended on what my parents decided to get or what my friends had. The PlayStation 3 generation hit during a formative age when I was able to make these purchasing decisions for myself, most importantly, with my own money.

The Milestone

Killzone was one of the first Sony exclusives to really get its hooks in me, and it’s left an imprint that’s long outlasted the series itself. As a big fan of Sci-Fi FPS games like Halo, Killzone scratched a similar itch while also being very unlike its colourful Microsoft counterpart. It depicted a gritty, realistic, and dirty kind of intergalactic war set against the backdrop of weaponised nationalism, propaganda, and sociopolitical discourse. You weren't fighting an unknowable alien threat. You were fighting people and ideologies. It was grim dark, but not in the far-flung, abstracted Warhammer 40K way. It was unlike anything I’d played before.

It's been 12 years since the last release in the series and up until the start of this project I'd enjoyed Killzone in a relative vacuum all of my life. It's not a series often talked about, and growing up, my friends were Xbox kids. Even Guerrilla Games has long since pivoted to the much more commercially successful Horizon series...and Killzone has been largely absent from any PlayStation public comms and services since they shuttered PlayStation Now, with only Liberation and Shadow Fall accessible on the PS5.

November 2nd, 2024, was to be the 20th anniversary of the series, and I had a suspicion that the milestone would largely go by unobserved by official sources.

The Team

I don't know what possessed me to go, "I could put something together for the anniversary," but I did. I didn't know how I'd celebrate the series exactly, but I certainly didn't expect to make what we ended up making. Despite a general lack of direction, I was determined to do something. I genuinely felt like who else was going to do it? That might sound a little glass-half-empty of me, given how big the series had been for a major first-party publisher, but I was sadly proved right.

Killzine: A Killzone Fanzine was a passion project that derailed my entire year. I decided to put out a call on social media to gauge contributor interest in February of 2024, not really expecting anything. What I got was an incredible team of talented artists and writers that helped me figure out where the surviving community for Killzone actually was (the answer is Reddit and Discord, naturally). With their help, we delivered an unbelievable 130+ pages of original developer interviews, features, and fanworks.

The Community

Many people contributed to the success of the zine as it evolved from a simple shower thought into a multi-person publication featuring interviews and unreleased original materials (yes, we even sourced and published the script for an official, unreleased comic series). However, three people specifically were the differentiator between us quietly releasing into a void or having a community poised to celebrate the milestone anniversary with us.

Meeting KT was divine intervention. I'd hoped that my public call for contributors would bring some talented internet strangers my way, but what I hadn't planned on was talented internet strangers with an almost unhinged and encyclopedic knowledge of Killzone and its lore, to a level that comfortably surpassed my own. KT is a talented artist and writer who not only contributed over 30 original art pieces to the zine, but also helped organise our merry band of creators into a form that could eventually deliver on our promises.

Our very first contact within the development space was also a huge influence on the success of the zine. Seb Downie-Blackwell had been at Guerrilla for an impressive 11-year tenure, working across all six games in the series. Working from QA to Production, I had hoped connecting with him would provide us with some great insight into the creation of the series, given he'd been there for it all. He gave us so much more. He was one of our biggest supporters, championing us publicly and to his ex-colleagues. If it hadn't been for Seb, who even spread the good word about us at Gamescom, the zine (and the volume of developers who got involved) would have been very, very different.

That brings us to Harra. One of the lead mods working across both the Killzone Discord server and subreddit. He enabled us to get in front of our intended audience, providing opportunities to speak directly to the communities he helped to manage. From pinning posts to the top of the subreddit to push notifications when we had a big announcement, the amount of eyeballs on our project would have been drastically reduced without his good nature and kindness.

With an expectant community now aware of our project, and a growing team and capacity to potentially deliver something even bigger than our wildest plans, we decided to bring the zine to Kickstarter. We never thought we’d get the chance to have Killzine printed. In fact, for the longest time, we didn’t look beyond it being a free, digital download that anyone could read.

Although that was still the core of the project, the bigger Killzine grew, the more excited we became about the possibility of a limited print run. After all, if someone else was making this thing, we knew we'd want a physical copy. Maybe other people would too. They did. Not only were we fully funded within 24 hours, but we finished the campaign having raised more than 200% of our original goal.

The Impact

With a print run of 100 physical zines now in the hands of readers, and with nearly 500 digital downloads of our free PDF, it's hard to communicate the impact of our little project in terms of hard numbers. It's more than just a community-created (and funded) book. It was a rallying cry for a largely maligned series and the stubborn players like us who long to see it return.

Killzine re-energised the conversation around the IP during a key anniversary. We were featured in Push Square, Last Stand Media, Gameranx, and more. We've had hundreds of messages of support from industry peers and fans of the series from around the world. We even organised and hosted the KILLZONE20YEARS multiplayer event in Killzone 2 (with our friends at PS Rewired), which saw full lobbies and intense firefights that made it feel like the game's heyday, despite official servers being shuttered over a decade ago.

The Challenges

The project wasn't without some specific challenges. As a ballooning creative endeavour that had exploded in scope, energised by an eager creator community, we had to both prevent feature creep we couldn't deliver on, while also ensuring the work we did commission would hit the deadlines we needed it to. Towards the end, my role was almost entirely production and team management, and it was my first time in a leadership role like that. Nothing like learning on the go!

Once we added a print version to the mix, ensuring we hit deadlines was vitally important, as any delay added to the lead time of getting files in the hands of the printing company and books in the hands of our backers. The physical distribution of said books was also an added complication. It was our first Kickstarter as a team, and international fulfilment costs ended up being higher than expected, with additional curveballs provided by the striking workers of Canada Post (our third-largest backer destination).

Our final hurdle to overcome was the design of the zine. I might have over-egged my ability to pull this together myself on an ad-hoc, completely amateur basis. It would have been fine if the project were still a solo one, but taking into account the volume of contributors, the fact that backers had paid for a product, and the printing company requiring very specific formatted files, I realised quickly that I was out of my depth.

Thankfully, for everyone involved, Kane Davis came to the rescue. A professional Senior Graphic Designer I'd worked with previously in the games industry, he volunteered his time and expertise to get our project over the line. He really made the design sing, adding flair I wouldn't have been able to match with unlimited time and budget. He didn't just execute a spectacular paperback; he also created a special edition hardback, taking inspiration and paying homage to the official Killzone Visual Design art book by Cook and Becker.

The Future

We didn't stop at the 20th anniversary. We were vocal supporters of Arrowhead's Killzone x Helldiverson collaboration, as well as calling for more licensing opportunities. One of the biggest parts of the conversation around the zine and our awareness campaign for it was our call for Sony to license out the Killzone IP more freely if they had no intention of revisiting it themselves. If not to us (an absurd pipe dream), to someone. The community rightly asked, "Who are you lot and why should Sony care? What would you even do with the IP if you got it?"

We went away, collecting data and feedback from the surviving (and active) Killzone community. We then used that data to inform a full game pitch for an original instalment in the series, entitled Killzone: Supremacy. Our calling card for the next generation. A satisfying entry for series veterans, while being completely accessible to the rookies in our ranks. We released it to the public on February 24, 2025, for the shared anniversary of Killzone 2 and Killzone 3.

Our efforts may not have encouraged any public comment or commitment for future games in the series (or the re-release of older titles on modern hardware), but only time will really tell what influence this project has truly had on key decision makers (if any).

Regardless, I'm incredibly proud of what the team and I managed to do. Coming together as strangers to make this thing and leaving as genuine friends who’d definitely love to work together again has been a really incredible experience. It's brought us together in a way that only games has a habit of doing.