Before Demon's Souls became the game that spawned a whole subgenre, FromSoftware built a version that looked a lot more like its own past. Newly surfaced footage from a 2007 internal Sony presentation shows an early prototype that let players fight enemies in first-person, a mode that never made it to release.
The find comes from Lance McDonald, the dataminer known for digging up FromSoftware's development history. According to the reporting, the material was shown at an internal Sony event, referred to as "Gameshare 4" or "GameShare IV," held in Tokyo in May 2007, nearly two years before Demon's Souls launched in Japan in February 2009. The package includes a PowerPoint deck and a roughly two-minute gameplay trailer, possibly the earliest look at the game in action.
A very different camera
The headline detail is the first-person camera. McDonald says it was a selectable mode players could toggle to, a clear nod to King's Field, FromSoftware's spiritual predecessor to the Souls games. It makes up only a small slice of the footage, but it points to how differently the game was once conceived.
The third-person view was also unlike the final release. Instead of the free-rotating, lock-on-driven camera that now defines the series' positioning-based combat, the prototype kept the camera locked behind a player model that always faced away from it. McDonald compares the strafing and backstepping controls to those of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, and PC Gamer likened the fixed rear view to the Jedi Knight games. The lock-on system that the franchise is now built around simply did not exist yet.
Cut content and a South Park cameo
The footage and slides are packed with early oddities. The trailer features bipedal snake men that resemble the man-serpents later seen in Dark Souls' Sen's Fortress. The Dragon God's arena appears as an open-air volcanic crater rather than the enclosed magma cavern of the final game, and the Vanguard Demon's arena and moveset look almost untouched, animations that carried all the way through to Elden Ring's Erdtree Avatars. Kotaku also notes the Dragon God encounter plays as a real boss fight here rather than the scripted set piece it became, plus a bizarre detail: the player kills a plain, ordinary alligator.
The PowerPoint itself is a time capsule. The deck already used the working title Demon's Souls and pitched a "worldwide blockbuster." It spent considerable time explaining the game's asymmetric multiplayer, framing it as a midpoint between MMOs and single-player RPGs. To make that point, Japan Studio dropped in a screenshot from South Park's "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode as an example of the MMO player stereotype the team wanted to avoid. The original 2007 talk was given by Daisuke Ishidate of Japan Studio, while McDonald enlisted Digital Foundry's John Linneman to read the slides in the new video. A development roadmap optimistically predicted completion in June 2008.
The discovery lands with some bittersweet context. Earlier this year Sony shut down Bluepoint, the studio behind the acclaimed Demon's Souls remake, despite praising its work.
For players following FromSoftware's output, this is a look at a road not taken rather than any new release. But it adds fascinating history to a lineage that runs straight through Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and the studio's upcoming Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods, and it shows how close the Souls formula came to being something entirely different.