Before Saints Row, Volition Made a Harry Potter RPG No One Knew About

Before Saints Row ever took over your Xbox, and decades before Hogwarts Legacy let players loose in an open-world wizarding school, Volition quietly built an RPG based on Harry Potter. The kicker? It’s never been seen by the public—until now.

Via GamesRadar, a never-released PS1-era demo was recently uncovered by The Strong National Museum of Play, and it shows Volition trying to pitch a top-down Harry Potter RPG in 1999—back when only the first few books were out, and Goblet of Fire hadn’t even hit shelves yet.

The prototype was basic—super basic. But the goal was ambitious: a Baldur’s Gate-style RPG based on Harry Potter, built before the movies gave anyone a visual playbook. According to Andrew Borman, director of digital preservation at the museum, the demo lets you walk around a sparse, unfinished town as Harry and Hagrid. That’s it. No spells, no combat, just a flythrough of a cobblestoned PS1 world.

“As far as I know, this has never been seen by the public before,” — Andrew Borman, The Strong Museum

Volition crafted the demo in just a few weeks to pitch the idea to the rights holders. One image shows a blocky Harry and Hagrid mid-stroll, while another captures a delightfully weird PS1 loading screen—red-and-blue checkerboards and all.

They Brought Robes and Owls to the Pitch Meeting

Yeah, you read that right.

“When Volition and THQ pitched this game, at least some of the THQ executives came dressed in robes and had owls with them,” — Andrew Borman

There’s something beautifully cursed about that sentence. You can just imagine a conference room full of execs in wizard robes, trying to sell a top-down Harry Potter RPG before the world even knew what movie-Hogwarts looked like.

Unfortunately, the pitch didn’t stick. EA eventually got the license and released Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001. Volition moved on—and would eventually blow the doors off with Red Faction and Saints Row instead.

To be clear, this wasn’t even a full prototype. It was more like a playable postcard—a “look what we could make” kind of thing. Volition only made just enough to show concept-level visuals and basic gameplay structure, based on the few books that existed at the time.

No Hogwarts. No Quidditch. Just a quiet, empty town where Harry and Hagrid stroll around on PS1 cobblestones. According to Borman, it shared DNA with games like Summoner, another early RPG that Volition worked on.

And now, all these years later, it finally resurfaces—pure gaming archaeology.

Volition’s Weird Legacy

After the Harry Potter pitch fell through, Volition pivoted hard. They built Summoner for PS2, and later broke through with the Red Faction series. But it was Saints Row—especially Saints Row 2 and 3—that turned them into a household name. Over time, they became known for outrageous, chaotic sandbox gameplay—about as far as you can get from a traditional wizard RPG.

Still, it’s wild to think how things might have gone differently. What if Volition’s Harry Potter took off? Would they have ever made Saints Row? Would open-world magic games have exploded in the early 2000s?

We'll never know. Embracer Group shut down Volition in 2023 as part of a brutal studio culling. But thanks to this rediscovered demo, a strange part of their history gets one last moment in the spotlight.

In a world where Hogwarts Legacy sold millions and opened the door to a new era of wizarding games, seeing this long-lost prototype is surreal. It’s a reminder of what the early days of video game development looked like—rough, experimental, and full of missed chances.

Before the movies, before the big-budget AAA adaptations, and before wizarding games became a billion-dollar idea, Harry Potter could have started life as a gritty PS1 RPG made by a team in the American Midwest—complete with cloaks, owls, and cobblestones.

That alternate timeline just got a little clearer.