Angie Smets talked about what it takes to build a new intellectual property for games at Gamelab.
Angie Smets talked about what it takes to build a new intellectual property for games at Gamelab.
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Angie Smets: How Guerrilla Games made Horizon Zero Dawn in 7 years

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 27 min

Horizon Zero Dawn is an epic game that you can play for scores of hours. When I finished the single-player campaign in 2017, I was only 32 percent done with the content in the post-post apocalyptic world.

But the story of the making of Horizon Zero Dawn — a brand new intellectual property for a Sony PlayStation 4 exclusive video game — is even more epic. I discussed the tale in a fireside chat with Angie Smets, who is an executive producer at Guerrilla Games in Amsterdam and was executive producer on Horizon Zero Dawn. She talked about why it took seven years to make the game and craft the inspiring female hero, Aloy.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.