Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One-exclusive, Scalebound, is a game that has been through a number of prototypes in its long development process, and was originally intended to be a very different game – one for Nintendo Wii.
Scalebound is being developed by Platinum Games and the studio’s director, Hideki Kamiya, has recently waxed lyrical about the project’s long development cycle as well as some of the challenges the dev team faced.
“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,” Kamiya said. “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.”
“When they first started [on Scalebound], the idea was for a Wii game and we wanted to use a Wii remote to do the orders for the dinosaurs,” Kamiya explained. “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 [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.”
And so, nearly ten years on from its initial creation, Scalebound is heading exclusively to the Xbox One in 2016.