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The fans spoke and we listened.
For those that recall the God of War survey conducted earlier this year, an overwhelming amount of the community suggested the PlayStation 2 experiences of Kratos be brought forth to the PlayStation 3.

Thanks to your feedback, we are excited to announce the God of War Collection for this Holiday Season. Now fans and newcomers to the series can experience the epic journey of God of War and God of War II in 720p HD form. Both titles have been remastered with anti-aliased graphics, running at 60 frames per second for a smooth gameplay experience, only on the PS3 system. Additionally, the Blu-ray Disc compilation will bring the PlayStation Network (PSN) trophy support to the franchise for the very first time.

This is your chance to experience God of War is its true form before the chaos of God of War III hits store shelves come March 2010.

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The Internet rejoiced yesterday as Sony officially announced the God of War Collection, a PlayStation 3 release that will see both the original classic plus its sequel hit the PS3 sometime this year, just in time to whet our appetite for next March's release of God of War III.

When we hear about something new related to the God of War franchise we always want more, so we got on the horn this morning with John Hight, the director of product development at Sony Santa Monica Studio, to find out what's in store for us.

IGN: First off, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

John Hight: No problem.

IGN: Let me start with some more generalized questions because the hot issue these days is backwards-compatability with PlayStation 2 games. So to clarify first off, is this package a "port" where you actually went in and changed the code to work on the PlayStation 3 as a PS3-specific title, or is this something that's running inside of an emulator?

John Hight: Well, I don't necessary agree with just the terminology "port", but given those two limited options, then we'd have to put it in the "port" category. We haven't developed general purpose code that would now work for every PS2 title out there. Basically what we wanted to do was we wanted to remaster [the games], and we've done a lot of things to not only have it run on the PS3 but also make it look better, perform smoother and have a little bit extra functionality.

Screen from the original PS2 release of God of War.

IGN: So how difficult was it for you to move it over to the PS3? A lot of people wanted to see God of War go there, but also things like the Team ICO stuff and a lot of other classic PS2 games. How difficult was it to move the game over, and do you think that this would be something feasible for other studios to do?

John Hight: Well, that goes back to how games were developed in the first place. For us, it wasn't too difficult because, and I'll brag on our engineering team, but the code they developed is pretty straightforward, well-documented, we don't do a lot of assembler programming, it's all straight C… Some teams have developed their own scripting language or whatever that would then require a translation of that interpreter over to the PS3 - we don't do that, it's straight C, so it made that aspect a lot cleaner. Plus, the other thing is that we've had very little attrition in our engineering team in our history of this studio, so the guys that originally wrote the code for God of War 1 are right here. Some of them worked on the port, some of them were able to offer, "Oh yeah, this is what's going on here. This part of the code's important" or "Don't worry, that part of the code's not important, you can ignore that", so it made it go a lot smoother, to have those guys around.

IGN: What we understand about the port, for lack of a better word, is that it's now at 720p, it runs at 60 frames-per-second, it's got anti-aliasing going on...

John Hight: 2X anti-aliasing...

Screen from the original PS2 release of God of War II.

IGN: Did you all do anything with using higher-resolution textures? Is there any way that the art has changed, or the number of frames of animation or anything like that?

John Hight: That's a good question. So, we're still kind of evaluating, but we were prepared to upgrade the textures, at least on Kratos on both games, but honestly it's looking so good that we're thinking, you know what? It's probably better to keep it in its pure form. We're playing around with potentially swapping out textures on some of the user interface and the fonts just to make them a little more readable. It looked great back on the PS2 on a regular TV, or even an HDTV, but once you get into an HDTV running at 720p, some of the text gets a little weedy, so we are going to swap that out.

IGN: Are there going to be any changes to the games whatsoever? Be it new content that's added in, or anything removed? Or will anything be tweaked, like for instance the spinning pillar in hell?

John Hight: [laughs] No, we're not tweaking anything. If we open up that can of worms, we would probably spend another year trying to right any wrongs we may have had, or areas that were perhaps a little more difficult in retrospect than we had hoped they would be. Instead, we kind of took the stance that we want it to be the pure experience, what people would have played when they played God of War originally.

But in terms of content, what we did add was network Trophy support. We felt like that was a pretty cool feature and it wouldn't violate the sanctity of the original games. But it also gives some bragging points.