Farewell, Canal House

Early next year, Guerrilla will relocate to a new building. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally outgrown the Canal House on the Herengracht. When we moved in here we had more space than we knew what to do with – two adjoined buildings, a monumental garden house, six stories of seventeenth century architecture and a reinforced basement which had doubled as a bank vault at one point. Now, every nook and cranny of the Canal House is filled with high-tech gadgetry, network cables, dev kits, monitors and action figures.

We knew the writing was on the wall when our power needs became so demanding that our neighbors started to experience brownouts. Adding an electrical transformer allowed us to at least finish Killzone 3 without bringing down the whole block, but the rising number of employees and the start of a new IP meant it was only going to be a temporary reprieve. (And we’re still hiring, by the way. You can check out guerrilla-games.com/jobs for a full overview of available positions.)

Anyway, we’ll miss the old Canal House – not just for its quaint atmosphere, but for its unique construction as well. Between the parallel-but-uneven stairwell columns and the mixed-height floors, it took new employees months to get a grasp of the layout. Many were the times an intern would get hopelessly lost, ending up in the wrong room or even on the wrong floor after returning from a meeting. The Canal House would’ve made a pretty good multiplayer level, but somehow we never got around to including it in a game.

As for the studio itself, Guerrilla isn’t going far: 700 meters to the east to be precise, to a lovely location overlooking Rembrandt Square. By sheer coincidence, the new building also used to be a bank – but unlike the Canal House, this one was constructed in the twentieth century. That means there will be plenty of space for high-tech gadgetry, network cables, dev kits, monitors, action figures and anything else we might choose to bring along.