PlayStation has published a new, two-hour documentary chronicling the development of Sony Santa Monica’s critically-acclaimed God of War reboot.
Entitled Raising Kratos, the video – published in its entirety on YouTube – documents how the game came to be, following the team from the game’s earliest conception to its nail-biting E3 reveal trailer to finally going gold. It offers a fascinating insight for players to see how a video game moves from merely an idea to a fully realised product.
Whilst published directly under Sony’s PlayStation brand, the documentary was candid about the many difficulties it faced across its five-year development cycle, including tough decisions about pushing back the release date, and the impact development has not just on the team itself, but also their friends and family members, too.
“I think I’ve been rehearsing that demo for a month,” Barlog said, waiting to premiere the game at E3 2016 (thanks, GamesRadar). “It’s just nine minutes, but to me, it’s the most important nine minutes of this game. That’s the one where everybody’s either gonna go ‘What the f–k are you doing’ or ‘What the f–k are you doing, that’s awesome!’ I have no idea what the answer is going to be either.”
Sony Santa Monica has secured an extensive array of awards since God of War’s release, including the GDC Game of the Year and nine accolades at the DICE Awards, including outstanding game direction, best adventure game, game design, story, art direction, and the much-coveted Game of the Year award.
Raising Kratos is just one of several feature-length documentaries focussing on Triple-A development released recently. Playing Hard, a docu-movie that went behind-the-scenes as Ubisoft developed For Honor, came to Netflix UK last month and described the movie as giving “unprecedented access to a highly secret world” of “the biggest entertainment industry in the world”.
The documentary follows the creation of the game For Honor across a four-year period, including what happened when, part-way through the project, “the director’s access to For Honor’s production floor was revoked” and it took “many months and discussions for Ubisoft to reverse its decision and give the documentary’s production team carte blanche”.
