Horizon Zero Dawn looks pretty good as a PS1 demake

Well, as good as a PS1 game can look these days

Horizon Zero Dawn has become one of the most popular and beloved games of the current console generation for PlayStation, and its recent sequel has proven to hold up against its predecessor. While we can see how far the series has come over just two games when it comes to its tech and mechanics, part of us also has to wonder what Horizon would have looked like back in the day… in say 1996, for example.

A YouTuber by the name of ZeoNyph has answered that question for us, because they made a short video previewing what Zero Dawn might look like as a PS1 game. It’s a minute-long clip featuring the PS1 bootup sequence, the game’s demade title screen, Aloy climbing a wall, and then subsequently dying to a Watcher in a very early PlayStation-esque fashion. It’s only a small sampling of what the game might have looked like back in the day, but it sure is a convincing one.

I think there’s something comforting about seeing a game we love in the graphics of generations past — and there’s something thematically relevant in there about seeing Horizon rendered for obsolete technology, right?

This also isn’t the first time we’ve seen a favorite game like Horizon as a PS1 demake — Bloodborne also got that treatment last year. Not only did fans make a video of a demade Bloodborne, but they also created a fully playable fan game of it that runs all the way through the first two bosses. The project took 13 months of development to complete, and understandably so, because it looks incredible. Now here’s hoping Horizon might get the same treatment, because there’s certainly much more of that game to see as a PS1 demake. I for one would love to see some low-poly Tallnecks.