Lance McDonald, the man responsible for ensuring that not a single scrap of FromSoftware’s development history goes undocumented, has uncovered footage of a prototype version of Demon’s Souls that shows off a frankly bizarre, alternate-universe take on the game that employs a first-person perspective.
Exactly how McDonald got his hands on this footage is currently a mystery, but it very much appears to be the real deal. As he explains, the May 2007 prototype footage and the accompanying presentation were originally showcased at an industry event titled “GameShare IV” in Tokyo.
There is so much to go over here, but it’s particularly difficult to ignore the reference to (and image from) South Park’s World of Warcraft episode Make Love, Not Warcraft, which features in a segment of the presentation on the difference between solo RPG players and MMORPG players. Talking up the virtues of Demon’s Souls as a single-player RPG, the presenter shows an image of the boys glued to their computers and jokingly saying that if you get hooked on an MMO, “you may end up like this.” (The segment starts at 3:58 in the video below, though it’s worth noting that the original 2007 presentation was given by Daisuke Ishidate who worked at Japan Studio at the time, while McDonald seems to have enlisted John Linneman of Digital Foundry for this recreation.) The 2000s were a simpler time.
Oh, and yeah, there’s a bunch of first-person perspective stuff in the prototype video, alongside a more rigid, front-facing third-person camera perspective. It seems that the early version of Demon’s Souls would have allowed players to switch between first- and third-person, and that the lock-on system that the Souls franchise is now known for didn’t exist at this point in time.
If you ask me, the weirdest part of the clip—other than the first-person perspective stuff—is that, at one point, there’s an alligator. Not a magic alligator, or an undead alligator…just a regular, normal-looking alligator that the player character murders for seemingly no reason. Very un-FromSoftware stuff.
Also, I feel like I have to point out this comment on the video from the FromSoftware content creator Illusory Wall, because it made the whole video ten times more interesting. As it turns out, at the 6:10 mark in the video, you can see the view from an area in the tutorial that was ultimately cut from the game. According to Illusory Wall, you can actually find exactly where this was supposed to be in the full release, although it’s impossible to access.
As I said, there’s way too much to go over here. For instance, I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the Demon God boss fight looks like an actual boss fight in the prototype build, and not a glorified interactable cutscene. All in all, the presentation is an incredibly fascinating discovery, and I can only hope that Lance McDonald has plans to release the presentation as a file we can download at some point in the near future.