Rescued E3 2001 video shows early version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic that's remained hidden for 22 years

pcgamer.com:

As part of a recent project to preserve pre/early internet gaming tapes and CDs, the videogame YouTube channel Noclip digitized an E3 2001 behind closed doors presentation of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. And it doesn't look like the KotOR I remember rushing home from middle school to play back in the early aughts.

My trained RPG nerd's ear instantly recognized project lead (and later Mass Effect helmsman) Casey Hudson as the one giving the talk, and he starts off slow, cycling through some pieces of KotOR concept art that have made the rounds online and in official companion books before. There is something fun to how he shows off art of what will eventually be Jolee Bindo or the Ebon Hawk in the final game without naming names.

We start getting to the real meat of weird, surreal, early KotOR with a model viewer demo of a rough-looking early Bastila as she cycles through various animations⁠—it seems pretty quaint in hindsight, but KotOR's model detail, character animations, and even procedural lip synching were a huge leap for RPG production values at the time. Even still, this not-Bastila looks like she belongs in a 6/10 PS2 launch title or an episode of Xavier Renegade Angel. 

That uncanniness only ramps up when Hudson loads into an early version of the Anchorhead settlement on Tatooine. The camera in this early build of KotOR is higher and farther away from your character, while the proportions of everything seem off. Characters are a little more squat and almost stylized, while the environments look scaled up and cavernous compared to the final game. It's a similar layout to the final Anchorhead though, and I'll bet BioWare iterated on this map for the final version. Curiously, Tatooine seems to be under