Sony's Santa Monica Studio is a well-known force in the gaming industry. As the minds behind the God of War franchise, it may be easy to paint this particular developer in Sony's first party stable as a one-trick pony. But as I learned when I sat down with Santa Monica Studio's Senior Director of Product Development Shannon Studstill, Sony's unofficial western flagship is anything but.

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Indeed, the stories Studstill relayed -- the money-crunch to finish the original God of War and being threatened with losing her job all the while, the internal battle on whether its sequel would be on PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, and perhaps most importantly the studio's role as indie developer incubator -- made clear that Sony Santa Monica is so much more. Studstill graciously gave a clear lens which to view her studio's storied history, as well as the path it continues to walk.Santa Monica Studio was founded in 1999 by Sony veteran and PlayStation evangelist Allan Becker in order "to break out of the corporate Foster City group" (a reference to Sony Computer Entertainment's business-centric hub). After a short stay in an office next to future compatriot Naughty Dog, the fledgling crew ultimately found themselves tucked away in a series of brick buildings in the suburbs of Santa Monica, California, away from the prying eyes of Sony executives."One of the key things for us at the time was open communication. We really wanted to have a collaborative open environment, no walls, no barriers between desks and that sort of thing." This mantra was at the very heart of the studio's design from the beginning. People like David Jaffe (already well-known for his Twisted Metal series) helped cultivate this attitude further. Jaffe would eventually give Santa Monica Studio its money-printing franchise God of War.Their directive? Ignore the PlayStation, and develop a game for that console's upcoming successor, PlayStation 2."It was about getting Kinetica out even though we were still team building... we were pretty green so we didn't have that team unity yet, we didn't have that heavy-handed family feel yet." Still, Kinetica got the job done. "We didn't go into Kinetica thinking it would be a new franchise, but certainly a new high concept." And while that all-important high concept ended up being the engineering foundation for a series to come, Kinetica still taught this new team other important lessons. "For me, [the memory of Kinetica] was shipping it on time and on schedule, just really that kind of production machine part, proving to Sony that we could ship something on time and stay within budget, and in this case we stayed under budget, which I'm surprisingly still proud of."Following Kinetica's release in 2001, the team turned its attention to the next project, a game that, several years later, would come to market as God of War and become one of the PlayStation 2's most substantial critical and commercial smash hits. But with so much time to incubate and support the idea of God of War, it was surprising to learn that Studstill and her team didn't know they had a bona fide hit on their hands until the game was only a few months from release.Tim Moss, Santa Monica Studio's Director of Technology, is well respected internally for his hardcore gaming sensibilities. During the Thanksgiving break of 2004, before the studio went into crunch mode to finish the game, he was sent home with a build of God of War under the directive to report back to Studstill on its quality."It's pretty ****ing good," Studstill quotes Moss as telling her. "And I was like 'holy ****'... because that was the one moment that I had a breath as the producer of one of the, at the time, most expensive products out of Sony." And there was reason for Studstill to be relieved, primarily because she had asked Sony's President of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, for more money to finish the still-untested project that previous spring.