Saints Row Creators Wanted to Create a Never-Before-Seen Baldur’s Gate-Style Harry Potter RPG Long Before Hogwarts Legacy
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While Hogwarts Legacy has impressed many with its take on the Harry Potter universe, the creators of Saints Row were aiming to do something groundbreaking many years ago. This was even before the release of the first Harry Potter film. The creators of Saints Row had big plans to bring the world of Harry Potter to life in an RPG style.
The game’s content was never seen by the public, and until now, no one outside of the studio knew much about it. It was recently shown to GamesRadar+ as part of a tour of The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
Volition Wanted to Create a Harry Potter RPG in the Style of Baldur’s Gate
According to Andrew Borman, the director of digital preservation at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, Volition was reading the Harry Potter books and wanted to create a video game based on the magical world. This was before Chris Columbus directed the first Harry Potter movie, so they had no visual reference material to work from.
There is some confusion about when exactly this was, but it was definitely before 2001, and maybe even earlier, as the EA game adaptation of the first movie was also released in that year.
Borman shared that they had seen material from the game, which was never shown to the public before. He said, “As far as I know, this has never been seen by the public before.” Unfortunately, he could not share the material, only describing it. “It’s pretty much just PS1-era Harry and Hagrid wandering around a small, unpopulated, unfinished town.”
The game had environments and characters in the style of Baldur’s Gate, with Borman saying it was similar to Summoner. It was also noted that Hagrid in this version looked better than the one in the EA game. The game allowed switching between characters, but there wasn’t much more to it.
Borman explained, “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.”
It is a sad story that Volition never managed to create that Harry Potter RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate, and the studio eventually shut down after the latest Saints Row game failed to meet commercial expectations.
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