“Scalebound” Originally Shelved Twice

Also Starred an 8-Year-Old Girl

By Bryan Smith on October 1, 2015 at 10:39am

Speaking with GameSpot, Hideki Kamiya, director for "Scalebound," discussed how the game became to be.

Originally, the game was basically in "idea mode" since 2006 as Kayima thought of how to envision the game.

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. Hideki Kamiya

It was after "The Wonderful 101" that the idea for "Scalebound" was brought back. Prior to this, however, there was a pitch for a Wii game with an eight-year-old girl and 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. 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.

"Scalebound" is slated to release on the Xbox One sometime in 2016.