Scalebound Was Originally a Wii Game With Dinosaurs, Protagonist Was a Little Girl

Ideas for the Xbox One exclusive Scalebound originally started in 2006, according to Platinum Games director Hideki Kamiya, and before the partnership with Microsoft came about the game had to be put on hold twice.

"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," said Kamiya. "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."

Originally the game looked and felt completely different. It was first going use the Wii remote and have dinosaurs instead of dragons. It also stared a little girl who controlled the dinosaurs.

"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," said Kamiya. "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. 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."

"The most fun for me is building out the dragon and then building the enemies of the dragon that’s going to fight and you see them start fighting on the screen and seeing those battles play out," he added. "That’s really what we wanted to do with the game from a core play perspective and being able to execute on that has been a lot of fun for me."

Scalebound releases exclusively on the Xbox One in late 2016.