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Update: Volition's unreleased Harry Potter demo – which offered people the chance to either play the rudimentary RPG or "flythrough" its sparse, cobblestoned environment – was put together in 1999, before the book for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was even released. We have also now added images to this article.
Decades before Hogwarts Legacy, and even before Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone kicked off the enduring film franchise, the studio that would eventually become known for Saints Row was in the early stages of developing an RPG based on the Harry Potter book series.
Footage of the doomed game, which has apparently never been seen or even heard of by the general public, was shown to GamesRadar+ as part of a tour of The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
As explained by Andrew Borman, the museum's director of digital preservation, the folks at Volition read all of the Harry Potter books that were out at the time and wanted to see the world realized in a video game. This was before the first Harry Potter movie, so they were able to begin handcrafting a world based on the series without any visual frame of reference.
This took place before the Sorcerer's Stone movie came out in 2001, the same year EA released its game adaptation of the same film.
Anyway, who cares? The simple fact that Volition was once making a Harry Potter game is video game history revealed for the first time, and there's footage of it! "As far as I know, this has never been seen by the public before," Borman said.
We won't provide full footage of what we saw, but we can share photos and describe what happened in it, and well: it's pretty much just PS1-era Harry and Hagrid wandering around a small, unpopulated, unfinished town.
The environments and character models looked like what you'd expect from a Baldur's Gate-style top-down RPG (Borman said it was similar to Summoner), although I will say Hagrid seemed to fare better than he did in EA's game, which you can see in the image up top. You can switch between the characters at will, but other than that there isn't a whole lot to do.
That's because, as Borman told us, "they made this over the course of, I think, a couple of weeks." Apparently, they made just enough of a game to pitch to the rights holders, and for whatever reason, it seemingly never went any further than that.
"The story is that, when Volition and THQ pitched this game, at least some of the THQ executives came dressed in robes and had owls with them," Borman said.
Volition would go on to create the Saints Row series and lead development on all of the new games in the series including the 2022 reboot, but its parent company Embracer closed the studio in 2023.
It's important to acknowledge Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's public and harmful stance on gender identity, which continues to challenge the inclusivity at the heart of the Harry Potter community. Here's our guide to the Hogwarts Legacy controversy for a more in-depth explanation.
