2007 was a pivotal year in the Call of Duty franchise. Infinity Ward’s colossal success Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare opened up a whole new money-bag-filled world for publisher Activision to make its fortune in - one that abandoned World War II for the technology of the modern era.

It wasn’t long before CoD alterna-developer Treyarch followed suit and made the Cold War thriller, Call of Duty: Black Ops, the successor to its Pacific theater shooter World at War. As of now, all signs point to them sticking their guns this holiday season with the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

An unfortunate casualty of this momentous shuffle, however, was the secret project, Call of Duty: Devil’s Brigade.

According to The Verge, the now-closed studio Underground Development (most recently of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Guitar Hero: Van Halen) had an initial green light from Activision to create a World War II Call of Duty spin-off in case Infinity Ward struck out with Modern Warfare. They hit a grand slam and the rest was history, but it’s taken as long as World War II itself to find out what the game actually looked like.

Devil’s Brigade was third person shooter featuring squad-based, tactical combat; exploration; and the “grim” real-life story of a specially trained band of Canadian and American soldiers, whose brutal yet effective tactics would be right at home in Inglorious Basterds - or the 1968 Devil’s Brigade movie that helped inspire the game at the time:

One of the game’s designers, Jason VandenBerghe, says that the goal was to create a 12-15 minute “vertical slice” of a demo that would kickstart the project. The result - what survives of the game today - was a mission to stealthily overtake a Nazi-occupied bridge in Rome:

Check out some of the production screenshots to see part of the war-torn landscape players would have navigated through:

“[The stage] was a piece of ground coming out of a sewer onto a low beach next to the Tiber River underneath one of the bridges. Using the squad controls and vaulting skills, the player would sneakily secure bridges and set explosive points, ultimately clearing a path for the massive American military.”

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Lead Designer Kyle Brink also added that the demo incorporated “squad commands and parkour moves.” These aren’t shown off in the brief grainy video below, but the prospect alone is enough to give you a picture how massively different the style would have been from previous Calls of Duty. Also notice how squad commands are mapped to the d-pad and on-screen instructions prompt you to order a stealth kill on an enemy guard.