Demon's Souls 2007 Prototype Footage Reveals a Scrapped First-Person Mode and MMO-Style Files

Demon's Souls almost played nothing like Demon's Souls. Lance McDonald, the dataminer who keeps finding things FromSoftware left behind, has just surfaced the earliest known prototype of the 2009 cult classic, and the build FromSoftware showed Sony at Gameshare 4 in 2007 had a fully playable first-person camera, Oblivion-style third-person strafing, and a pitch deck that included a South Park gag aimed straight at World of Warcraft players.

McDonald posted the full presentation, the gameplay capture, and the supporting images on August 7, almost nineteen years after the internal Sony Computer Entertainment event. The slideshow was built in PowerPoint 2007 by Japan Studio PD#3, the internal team that co-developed Demon's Souls with FromSoftware before Sony's Western arm decided the game was too weird to localize. The working title never changed, the premise was already there (ruined castles, lone wastelands, cursed locations), and the enemy pitch list reads like a sketchbook for Dark Souls: snake-headed men, twisted mutants, and creatures that would resurface, in different shapes, across the next decade of Souls games.

The headline shock is the camera. In the prototype, players could fight in first-person, with the perspective flipped from what we ended up shipping. Today's Demon's Souls is a strict unfixed third-person game, the kind of camera Miyazaki codified across King's Field, Demon's Souls, and the rest of the Souls line. The 2007 build offered both: a first-person option you could select at will, plus a third-person mode that had a fixed, deliberate camera, with the left stick handling strafing and backsteps the way Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion did. McDonald is careful to call it a deliberate reference, not a coincidence. Someone on the team had been playing Oblivion and wanted to bring that combat feel over.

What got cut before launch

First-person mode was not the only casualty. The prototype footage also shows a set of enemies that never made it into the shipping game, including men with snakes for heads, a creature type that would reappear years later in Sen's Fortress in the original Dark Souls, plus a plain old crocodile that just never returned. The ghost system, on the other hand, was already in the prototype and stayed, which is why you can still feel its fingerprints in every Souls game since. The studio knew what it wanted to keep and what to throw away.

There is also a working theory, based on file names that have floated around the community for years, that the project originally contained some kind of MMO-adjacent system. McDonald's presentation does not prove that, but the pitch slides lean toward online play, with the team openly worried about the MMORPG stigma of the era. The deck called out a stereotypical image of MMORPG players using a screenshot from South Park's Make Love, Not Warcraft, the episode that skewered World of Warcraft, and used the cartoon fat-Cartman as the example of what Demon's Souls was not going to be. They wanted offline action with online connective tissue, which is, of course, what shipped.

Why this matters more than a regular old leak

Demon's Souls is one of the foundational games of the last two console generations. The PS3 original went from a Japan-only curiosity to the seed of Elden Ring, and every modern Souls clone is still chasing its mood, its level design, and its risk-reward loop. Finding out that the camera was almost a player-selectable toggle changes how you read the whole series. It also reframes Sony's decision in 2008 to refuse a Western release. The Japanese version of Demon's Souls landed February 2009, ATLUS picked it up for North America in October 2009, and by the time Dark Souls shipped in 2011 as a multiplatform FromSoftware game, the studio had already pivoted away from Sony's first-party orbit. None of that happens without Demon's Souls going viral through word of mouth.

McDonald's timing is also worth noting. Less than a year after he discovered the unused cutscene in Elden Ring that rewrote a chunk of the lore, he has now pulled off the equivalent trick on Demon's Souls. He is not just datamining, he is curating the FromSoftware archive. The same guy who exposed Sekiro's cut content is now doing it for the studio's first real hit. Every time he drops something, the Souls community treats it like a holiday.

How the community took it

Reaction across Twitter, ResetEra, and YouTube was split in the most Souls way possible. Some longtime fans loved the first-person clip and immediately started asking for a Bluepoint-style remake that finally shipped the alternate camera as a toggle. Others pointed out that fixed-camera third-person is what made Demon's Souls work as a deliberate, methodical game, and that pulling the camera back into first-person would have erased half the tension. A loud chunk of the replies just turned into a meme: WE ALMOST HAD KING'S FIELD, repeated over and over by people who remember that FromSoftware's pre-Souls output was already first-person and who would have killed for one more fixed-camera dungeon crawler.

The CriticalPixel take

Demon's Souls nearly being a first-person action RPG would have been a different genre entirely. King's Field with weight, Oblivion combat in a dying medieval kingdom, no lock-on target, no shield-poking meta. Some of us would have loved it, others would have hated it, and the entire downstream chain, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, would look weird in a parallel timeline. FromSoftware shipping the third-person fixed-camera build is the reason we have a genre named after their game. That is a thing we should all sit with the next time someone complains about the camera in Elden Ring Nightreign.

Also, a small tip of the hat to Lance McDonald for pulling another rabbit out of FromSoftware's filing cabinet, and to whoever at Japan Studio PD#3 in 2007 thought it was a good idea to use a fat Eric Cartman to explain the design philosophy of a Sony-exclusive action RPG. That pitch deck absolutely did not age the way they expected, and it absolutely made this leak a thousand times better.