Demon's Souls Was Almost a First-Person Game

Picture the opening hours of Demon's Souls, but instead of watching your knight from behind as they creep through the fog-choked Boletarian Palace, you're staring down the corridor through their eyes. First-person. Sword raised in front of you. No lock-on reticle. No free-rotating camera. Just you and whatever is waiting around the corner.

That version of the game existed, at least in prototype form. Lance McDonald, the dataminer and FromSoftware historian who has made a career out of pulling buried development secrets into the light, shared footage and presentation materials from a May 2007 internal Sony event called Gameshare 4. The materials, originally presented by Japan Studio's Daisuke Ishidate, show Demon's Souls roughly two years before its Japanese launch, and the differences from the final product are staggering. As reported by Kotaku's Lewis Parker, McDonald appears to have enlisted Digital Foundry's John Linneman to narrate a recreation of the original presentation.

The prototype footage runs about two minutes and includes sequences played in first-person, a camera mode that would have been toggled on and off at will. FromSoftware's King's Field series, the spiritual ancestor to Souls, was entirely first-person. What we're seeing in this prototype is the bridge between those two eras, the moment where FromSoftware hadn't yet committed to the third-person action RPG formula that would go on to define an entire subgenre of games for the next two decades.

A Camera That Changed Everything

Even the third-person mode in this build looks nothing like what shipped. The camera was locked behind the player model, always facing the direction the character faced. As PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield noted, the left stick controlled strafing and backsteps in a scheme McDonald compared to Oblivion's third-person controls. There was no free-rotating camera. No lock-on system.

I cannot overstate how different this would have made the game. The entire combat identity of Souls, from Demon's Souls through Elden Ring, is built on a camera you can whip around your character while locking onto enemies to manage spacing and positioning. Remove that, and you don't just have a different game. You have a different genre. The dodge-roll timing, the backstab fishing, the careful circling of a boss's flank: none of it works without that camera. If FromSoftware had shipped the version shown at Gameshare 4, I think we'd be living in a timeline where "Soulslike" as a category simply doesn't exist.

The prototype also features enemies that never made the final cut. Snake-headed humanoids show up here, creatures that FromSoftware clearly liked enough to recycle into Dark Souls' Sen's Fortress years later. There's also, inexplicably, a regular crocodile. Not a demon crocodile. Not an undead crocodile. Just a crocodile, standing in a dungeon, waiting to be killed. FromSoftware has always had a strange relationship with normal animals in abnormal places, and apparently that impulse was there from the very beginning.

The South Park Slide

One of the stranger moments in the presentation has nothing to do with gameplay. Japan Studio included a screenshot from South Park's "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode, showing an overweight Cartman glued to his computer, as an example of the "stereotypical image of MMORPG gamers." The point was to position Demon's Souls as a middle ground between solo RPGs and MMOs: you'd get online interaction through the ghost and messaging systems, but you wouldn't lose your life to a subscription-based grind. The 2007 energy radiating off that slide is almost overwhelming.

The presentation also included a development roadmap predicting completion by June 2008. Demon's Souls launched in Japan in February 2009, roughly eight months late. More telling are the repeated references to a "worldwide release" throughout the slides, a plan that Sony famously abandoned. The company only published the game in Japan, leaving Atlus to handle the North American release and Bandai Namco to cover Europe. Seeing those optimistic "worldwide" references now, knowing how close the game came to never reaching Western audiences at all, adds a layer of dramatic irony that the original presenters couldn't have anticipated.

Beyond the camera and the cut enemies, the footage shows the Vanguard Demon in an arena that looks nearly identical to the final game. Its animations survived not just into Demon's Souls but all the way to Elden Ring's Erdtree Avatars. The Dragon God, meanwhile, appears in an open volcanic crater rather than the enclosed magma cavern players know. And there's a glimpse of a tutorial area that was cut from the final release but, according to FromSoftware content creator Illusory Wall, can still be located in the game's geometry if you know where to look.

This is the kind of discovery that reframes how you think about a game's legacy. Demon's Souls wasn't born fully formed. It was one camera decision away from being a King's Field successor that a small audience adored and everyone else ignored. FromSoftware choosing to build a free third-person camera with lock-on targeting wasn't just a design choice; it was the single decision that made Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring possible. McDonald's track record of surfacing material like this, including an unused Elden Ring cutscene that expanded the game's lore, has made him one of the most valuable archivists in gaming. If he ever gets around to releasing the full presentation files, they'll be required reading for anyone who cares about how FromSoftware became FromSoftware.