This page details prerelease information and/or media for Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne.

Development Timeline

1999
- November - Atlus announces PS2 plans. A Megami Tensei game is also planned. ^[1]
2000
- March - Tokyo Game Show Spring - The first prototype to test the networking features of the PS2 is shown off at Tokyo Game Show 2000 Spring. Five PS2's were connected to a LAN system where four of them were consoles that you could play the actual game. ^[2] ^[3] Following this, a tech demo was made to test the PlayStation 2 further to fully envision the game. ^[4]
- Game development started.
2002
- Game development properly started. ^[5]
- September - At Tokyo Game Show 2002, the game was shown with a release date of 2003 SPRING. ^[6]
  - A playable demo of Nocturne was also playable at the convention. ^[7]
2003
- Shin Megami Tensei IIIː Nocturne was released February 20th 2003 in Japan.

Networking Functions Development

Rare photo of this LAN game.

At Tokyo Game Show 2000, a LAN-networking prototype with Cerberus was shown off. An action game where five PlayStation 2's were connected together with four players and one spectator.
It was made for internal research to experiment with the PlayStation 2 hardware so they could adapt to making games with polygons instead of sprites. Since the Shin Megami Tensei series had never been rendered in 3D before, they had to test out various things.
The main goal was to test how the demon models would be animated and generally just move around on the new console.
The result was a game with the title "ネットワーク機能研究開発作品", which translates to "Network Features Research and Development Piece".

(Source: PepsimanGB)

Tech Demo
Early Tech Demo of the game which explored various concepts.

Vortex Prototype
An early build of the game when it was known as Shin Megami Tensei III: Vortex.

Nocturne Prototypes
Footage of the later protos.