Darksiders II Dev Rushed A Wii U Demo That Was Never Used.

November 19, 2018 Ryan Engstrom

Back at E3 2011 Nintendo was set to reveal the Wii U, a successor to its Phenomenally successful Wii console. To accompany this announcement Nintendo had reached out to many developers to create and showcase their games. One of these developers was Virgil Games, creators of the Darksiders franchise. During the Wii U reveal a brief teaser trailer showed Darksider II running on the platform. But there was something many of us didn’t know, Darksiders II was actually supposed to be playable on the show floor at Nintendo’s booth! In a recent interview on the Game Informer Show former Vigil Games founder David Adams, now with Gunfire Games, talked about the experience.

That was interesting. Nintendo came to us and said, ‘Hey, can you put this on Wii U? And we’ll show you in the press conference.’ Or when they announced the Wii U. And so we actually said, ‘I mean, we’ll give it a shot.’ I actually helped on that too, because I used to be a programmer. So it was me, our tech director, and our graphics programmer and we all piled into an office and worked on it for like a month and got it all up and running. And then that didn’t last… well actually, Nintendo was going to show it at their booth, and at the last minute they were like, ‘Eh, nevermind.’ But they still showed it in their press conference, so that’s cool. They were like, ‘Just kidding!’ We were working until like middle of the night, every night trying to get it working on the Wii U.

Darksiders II would go on to be one of the most notable launch titles on the Wii U and subsequent launch window. Darksiders II even did well enough to justify bringing a remaster of the original game, Darksiders: Warmastered Edition, to the Wii U in 2017. What do you all think about Nintendo pulling a 180 on Virgil Games?