Xbox One exclusive Scalebound is looking to be a great hack and slash game, but this game wasn’t always the dragon riding title that we know it as now. Speaking with GameSpot, Hideki Kamiya said that the game has been something the studio has wanted to do for a very long time and even called it his dream game. The game has been kicked around as an idea and gone through multiple iterations ever since PlatinumGames was formed in 2006.
Kamiya said, “If you look at the long span of it, the first idea for Scalebound was when we started the company and were thinking of ideas and games that we want to make. The idea popped up there, but then we made Bayonetta. Then after Bayonetta, we revived the idea and made a prototype but that prototype failed and the game got cancelled. It was put on a backburner for a variety of reasons and we moved on to The Wonderful 101.”
Once PlatinumGames was finishing up development on The Wonderful 101, Hideki Kamiya brought Scalebound back and made changes to his original idea. The game was very different than to what it is now, it was a Wii motion controlled game with a little girl who controlled dinosaurs instead of dragons!
Kamiya added, “When they first started, the idea was for a Wii game and we wanted to use a Wii remote to do the orders for the dinosaurs. You were in control of the dinosaurs, you were ordering the dinosaurs around, and they’d do cool things. Then after we made Bayonetta, we started the prototype. The first thing that I made a change to was making it a dragon game.”
“We changed the dinosaurs to dragons, but at that point the lead character was even weaker than the current protagonist Drew is in the context of Scalebound,” he continued. “She was actually a little girl who was with these dragons. As we were making this prototype, I realized that I didn’t want to just be watching the fight, I wanted to be more participatory in the fight. And I started talking with the staff about how maybe we should change this to be a swordsman or someone a little bit older. This was when the prototype got put on the backburner, so to speak, and the project was halted. Then we made The Wonderful 101.”
Scalebound will release sometime in 2016 as an Xbox One exclusive. If you’re interested in other games that changed a lot throughout their development, I wrote an article on 5 games that changed drastically throughout the process featuring Batman Arkham Asylum, Metal Gear Solid 5 and a few others.
Source: GameSpot
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.