A four-hour playthrough of an early lost version of Until Dawn has been uploaded to YouTube, as spotted by VGC.
The gameplay footage is from when Supermassive was developing the project as a first-person title for the PS Move and is from a build dated January 2013, which hasn't yet been archived on the preservation website Hidden Palace.
As you may expect, the footage is vastly different from the final product, which was released in 2015, featuring different voice actors and character models for much of the game's main cast, as well as a string of motion-controlled inspired interactions and puzzles. It was uploaded to YouTube by the account Digital Preservation and is four hours long in total, covering chapters 1 through 16.
In case you're unaware of the project's history Until Dawn had somewhat of a drawn-out development. It originally started out as a PS Move title at Sony's London Studio in 2008, described as "Scream versus I Know What You Did Last Summer", and featured a story about a mysterious masked murderer chasing a group of teenagers around a mountain — one year after the tragic death of their friend Hannah.
This version of the game was originally previewed at Sony's press conference in 2009 and in an introduction video uploaded to PlayStation's YouTube channel in May 2010 but was later cancelled in March 2011, despite some progress being made on several of its chapters.
Unbeknown to most of the original London Studio team, Sony then decided to reboot the project elsewhere at Supermassive Games — the developer of PlayStation Move games like Tumble, Start the Party!, and Sackboy's Prehistoric Moves — who carried on making the game as a PS Move title, bringing on board the American writers' Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick to reconfigure its story.
This new version of the game added Wendigos, replacing the masked killer of the original, but would also ultimately go through several iterations of its own, eventually moving development over from the PS3 to the PS4 prior to its release and taking advantage of Guerrilla Games' Decima Engine.
An updated remake of the game was released last year, in October 2024, developed by the UK studio Ballistic Moon. However, as VGC highlights, prior to its release, the studio ended up revealing it was undergoing significant restructuring, resulting in huge layoffs to “secure the future” of the company.
As for the original creator of Until Dawn — Sony's London Studio — it ended up closing last year, in May 2024, with the company issuing one final heartfelt goodbye to its fans.
A film based on Until Dawn is expected to be released later this year, on April 25th, directed by David F. Sandberg (the Swedish director behind Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and Shazam!).