Seasoned FromSoftware investigator Lance McDonald has shared a recently uncovered early internal showcase of Demon’s Souls, FromSoft’s crucial pivot point between King’s Field and Dark Souls, and the progenitor of its own subgenre.
The demonstration consists of a PowerPoint presentation deck and early gameplay trailer. It was shown at “Gameshare 4,” an internal Sony event held in May, 2007, almost two years before Demon’s Souls’ initial release in Japan.
The real highlight is that two minute gameplay showcase, possibly the earliest look we’ve ever gotten of Demon’s Souls in action, with key differences from the final game. First and most striking: There are a few sequences in a first-person camera mode à la King’s Field, FromSoft’s spiritual predecessor to Souls. It makes for a distinct minority of the footage’s runtime, and seems to have been an optional mode you were meant to toggle between.
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It also ties into what strikes me as an equally profound, but less immediately grabbing difference: Demon’s Souls’ early 3D camera was locked behind the player model, which always faced away from the camera—it reminds me of the Jedi Knight games, for a frame of reference.
This would have complimented the first person mode better than the final camera, but it would have also made for a radically different overall experience. The Souls series of today is defined by a camera that can freely rotate around the player and lock onto enemies—it’s the bedrock of the games’ positioning-based combat.
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The demo takes place in an early version of Demon’s Souls’ tutorial area. The Vanguard Demon is shown in his same arena, practically unchanged compared to the final game—indeed, his moveset and animations have survived all the way to Elden Ring with the Erdtree Avatars.
The Dragon God’s arena is open-air in this version, a volcanic crater instead of the magma cavern of the final game. The trailer also features enemies not seen in Demon’s Souls’ release version: Bipedal snake men resembling the man-serpents of Dark Souls. FromSoft loves revisiting a motif.
There are plenty of interesting nuggets in the PowerPoint as well, read in the video by John Linneman of Digital Foundry. Here’s what stood out to me:
- Some striking concept art, including the Flamelurker boss and an open, grassy area with a weird, big hole at the center—the ominous valley and strange rock formations weirdly remind me of the fingerprint ruins from Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.
- FromSoft and Sony clearly felt Demon’s Souls’ asymmetric multiplayer was its ace in the hole (and/or potentially confusing), and spent a lot of runtime explaining it.
- They presented it as a midpoint between MMOs and pure singleplayer games, joking that it would destroy your life less than the former (complete with a reference to South Park’s “Make Love, Not Warcraft”).
- A real “Oh, bless their hearts” development roadmap that predicted completion in June, 2008. Demon’s Souls launched in Japan in February ’09.
- Repeated references to a “worldwide release,” underlining the bad feelings that must have resulted over Sony only publishing Demon’s Souls in Japan.
Overall, what was at the time an anodyne bit of internal corporate communication is now an invaluable piece of videogame history. Demon’s Souls was a crucial transition game that could have just as easily become a fondly-remembered but little-played cult classic.
It almost didn’t make it to America and Europe, and there was no guarantee that it would prove one of the most influential games on the coming decade. Now we understand how close it was to being a very different experience.
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