Disaster 2: The Sequel That Never Happened

Nine Months to Make a Disaster

In early 2006, a Nintendo executive and Monolith Soft president Hirohide Sugiura agreed to make a new game with impressive cinematic presentation for the Wii launch. Producer Hitoshi Yamagami later said that the project began with that conversation. Until then, Monolith Soft had been known mainly for Xenosaga and Baten Kaitos. The studio knew how to create long story sequences and RPGs, but it had never made a full-scale action game.

At first glance, the choice of developer may seem strange. Nintendo, however, was counting on Monolith Soft's skill at staging story scenes. That was why the studio proposed a game inspired by American disaster movies, in which the hero would survive an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a flood, and other catastrophes. Shootouts, chases, and civilian rescues were added to the concept.

Nintendo liked the idea immediately. The only problem was the schedule: the entire project was given nine months so the game could launch alongside Wii. Tadashi Nomura of Monolith Soft believed the developers could finish in time if they kept the scope under control. They did not manage to keep it under control.

While Monolith Soft was trying to finish an increasingly complicated game in nine months, Nintendo was already preparing to show it to the public. At E3 2006, the company presented the first Disaster trailer. It contained no gameplay, only bleak concept art of collapsing cities. One of those images survived in Nintendo's official press kit: a man stands among ruined skyscrapers as a gigantic wave approaches the city. Even these early materials make it clear that Disaster was never intended as a realistic rescue simulator. From the start, it was conceived as a spectacular disaster movie.

Early concept art from Nintendo's E3 2006 press kit. It already shows the game's original idea: one man remains among the ruins of a city as an enormous wave approaches.
Nintendo / Disaster: Day of Crisis concept art from the E3 2006 press kit / Hidden Palace

While the public was looking at concept art, development inside the studio was already going off schedule. When Monolith Soft started work on Disaster, the developers did not yet have a special version of the future Wii hardware on which they could run and test the unfinished game. In fact, the console was not even called Wii yet. Nintendo had given the studio only approximate specifications for the new system, so the first versions of Disaster had to be built on GameCube development hardware.

The scale of the problem became clear when Monolith Soft finally received the new hardware and moved the completed part of the game onto it. Much of it did not work as the developers had expected. There had never been much time to spare, and now meeting the nine-month deadline was impossible.

Development Became a Disaster Too

Yamagami later joked in an interview with Nintendo Online Magazine that development itself had become the real disaster. Nintendo realized far too late how badly the external studio had fallen behind schedule. By the time only a short period remained before delivery, catching up was no longer possible.

Meanwhile, Monolith Soft was still trying to make the Wii launch at any cost. The developers simplified gameplay mechanics while preserving the story and sequence of disasters. Director and writer Keiichi Ono gave a simple example: the player would walk up to an injured person and press A. That was it; the person was saved. Naturally, this was far too little for a game about rescue work.

In September or October 2006, just before Wii launched, Nintendo finally proposed stopping development and starting over. The company even considered canceling the project entirely. Yamagami, however, thought the combination of natural disasters and a cinematic story was too unusual to abandon. The project received more time and a new budget, and the entire development process was reorganized.

Disaster: Day of Crisis development printouts laid out during an interview with the developers. The table holds materials for individual scenes and mechanics that were reworked after the project reboot.
Nintendo and Monolith Soft / Disaster: Day of Crisis development materials in N.O.M. No.123 / Nintendo Online Magazine

The development approach also changed after the reboot. By early 2007, Nintendo and Monolith Soft employees were working on Disaster as a single group. They no longer had to rush out the cut-down version originally planned for the Wii launch. The developers had time to revisit failed decisions, rework weak areas, and propose new ideas.

As a result, Disaster was not merely delayed. The version prepared for the Wii launch was almost entirely rebuilt. The rescue mechanics changed especially dramatically.

Rescue Instead of Pressing A

After the reboot, the rescue sequences became much more involved. Players no longer pressed a single button. They had to lift debris, perform chest compressions, provide first aid, extinguish fires, and pull people out of dangerous places. Many of these actions were performed by moving the Wii Remote.

In the finished game, the player lifts a heavy slab with the Wii Remote. This scene shows what the old “walk up and press A” idea became after the reboot.
Nintendo and Monolith Soft / demonstration of Disaster: Day of Crisis rescue mechanics in N.O.M. No.123 / Nintendo Online Magazine

The changes were not limited to rescue scenes. At first, the developers even considered supporting the Classic Controller, because the Wii Remote was new not only to buyers but also to game creators. After the delay, however, the expectations for motion controls became higher. If Disaster had launched with the console, a few simple remote gestures might still have felt novel. By 2008, that was no longer enough, so Yamagami wanted the controls to be more varied.

Disaster gradually became a mixture of several genres. The player alternated between rescuing survivors, running, shooting, and driving. At the same time, Nintendo did not want the game to appeal only to experienced players. The company also hoped to reach people who enjoyed story-driven games and disaster movies, even if they were less comfortable with shooting or racing.

The driving sequences caused the most trouble. An experienced player could memorize the route and finish it quickly, while a newcomer might crash into the very first obstacle. Simply slowing the car down was not an option, because scripted explosions and collapses were triggered at fixed moments. The road could therefore fall apart before the player reached it, leaving only the aftermath of the disaster instead of the event itself.

A driving sequence during a volcanic eruption. The developers adjusted the road destruction so it would happen in front of the car regardless of the player's speed.
Nintendo and Monolith Soft / car escape sequence in N.O.M. No.123 / Nintendo Online Magazine

To solve the problem, the developers tied the destruction to the car's position. This ensured that it always happened directly in front of the player, but the adjustment itself could not be obvious. Realism sometimes had to be sacrificed: the car might make a turn at a speed that would have sent it off the road in real life. What mattered was making the player feel like the hero of a movie rather than someone constantly fighting the controls.

The extra development time also allowed Monolith Soft to add familiar RPG elements to Disaster. Ray could improve his stats and buy weapons, while a poor equipment choice could be compensated for by leveling up the character. Before Disaster, the studio had worked mainly on RPGs, so it returned to familiar ideas even in an action game.

Finally, the English dialogue was recorded in Los Angeles, and American actors were hired for motion capture. Keiichi Ono spoke English well, so he personally discussed delivery with the actors and took their suggestions into account. This helped create the game's deliberately Western hero: Ray, a bearded and muscular former Marine who is constantly forced to rescue someone.

By 2008, Disaster had become a very different game from the one Monolith Soft had planned to finish quickly for the Wii launch. After such a long and expensive rebuild, however, a new question appeared: could the game earn back its cost?

A Release Without North America

Disaster: Day of Crisis was originally scheduled to launch in Japan on July 3, 2008, but in May the date was moved again so the project could be polished. This delay was brief: the game arrived on September 25. Disaster then launched in Europe on October 24 and in Australia on November 13.

The finished game was uneven but unusual. Some reviewers criticized its inconsistent graphics, overlong shootouts, and vehicle controls. Others praised exactly that unpredictable mixture: a few minutes earlier, the player had been rescuing an injured person; then they were shooting at terrorists; now they were running from a wall of water. Even the deliberately absurd dialogue strengthened the resemblance to an expensive and not especially intelligent summer blockbuster.

Ray is caught among collapsing buildings as a cloud of dust rolls down the street and debris falls around him. In scenes like this, Disaster most closely resembled an interactive disaster movie.
Nintendo / Disaster: Day of Crisis screenshot from press materials / Nintendo Life

The game never came out in North America, and the exact reason remains unknown. Reggie Fils-Aimé never publicly announced that the release had been canceled. In October 2008, Matt Casamassina said on an IGN podcast that the head of Nintendo of America did not believe Disaster was worth $50 and was especially critical of the sound. According to Casamassina, the final decision was supposed to depend on European sales. This account survives in an Infendo news report, but no direct recording of the conversation with Reggie is available.

Another reason to doubt the sequel appeared in November, when Yamagami admitted in an interview with Cubed3 that the game had sold below expectations. It would seem that any discussion of a second game should have ended there. Yet the sequel idea had appeared slightly earlier, while Nintendo was still waiting to see how players responded.

A Sequel Was Already Being Discussed

To understand what stood behind those plans, we need to go back one month, to October 2008. Shortly after the Japanese release, Nintendo published a long interview with the Disaster developers. Near the end, the conversation turned to a possible sequel. Yamagami said that he had already discussed a second game with Keiichi Ono, and that Monolith Soft had even submitted a proposal for the new project to Nintendo. Nintendo was in no hurry to make a final decision, however. The company first wanted to see how the original sold.

The interview does not reveal how thoroughly the studio had developed its ideas. The proposal may have been a full document describing the story and gameplay mechanics, or it may have been only a broad concept. Yamagami mentioned neither a prototype nor an assembled development staff nor the start of full production.

One month later, a Cubed3 journalist asked Yamagami and Ono the same question more directly. Yamagami confirmed that the developers already had a sequel concept, but added that everything depended on sales and player interest. Ono, meanwhile, said that a second game could use mechanics that had been cut from the original. He did not even rule out a Nintendo DS version, although he admitted that large-scale disasters looked better on a television.

Public discussion of the sequel stopped after the Cubed3 interview. The next clue appeared almost four years later in Keiichi Ono's résumé.

The Mysterious Line in the Résumé

Keiichi Ono left Monolith Soft in January 2012 after eleven years and nine months with the company. In May, his LinkedIn profile was noticed on the NeoGAF forum, and Nintendo Everything later published a translation of the résumé.

The document made clear how important Ono had been to Disaster. He prepared the original game concept, presented it to the publisher, assembled the development staff, directed about 60 employees inside the studio, coordinated external contractors, and was responsible for the overall design and main story.

The next line matters more for this story. Immediately after Disaster in the list of projects was an “unannounced project” labeled Action/Wii. Ono served as chief planner, supervised the design, and wrote the basis of the story. The résumé did not provide a title, development dates, or any information about what ultimately happened to the project.

This line gave rise to the Disaster 2 theory. The similarities are genuinely persuasive: the same console, the same genre, the first game's director working on the project, and an existing proposal for a sequel. Yet the theory depends on two assumptions: that the résumé lists projects in strict chronological order, and that Monolith Soft could not have had another Wii action game in development. Neither assumption has been confirmed.

Moreover, NeoGAF users already noted in 2012 that Ono had not called the game canceled. The claim that the project was “almost certainly” a canceled Disaster sequel came from a forum user, not from LinkedIn. Over time, however, this guess began to be repeated almost as fact.

The only cautious conclusion is that an unannounced Wii action game really did exist and may well have been a Disaster sequel, but no evidence currently proves it.

Even if Monolith Soft truly intended to make Disaster 2, the chances of such a game appearing were steadily shrinking. To understand why, we need to look at what the studio was doing at the time.

Monolith Soft Returns to RPGs

For that, we need to return once again to 2006. While the Disaster developers were trying to make the Wii launch, Tetsuya Takahashi proposed building a game world on the bodies of two giants. In July 2006, Yasuyuki Honne began sculpting a clay model of them. To employees busy with Disaster, it looked as though he was simply playing with clay. In reality, the developers used the model to determine which parts of the bodies could become game locations.

That was how Xenoblade began. Work on a prototype started in April 2007, after Disaster had already been reorganized under its new plan. Hitoshi Yamagami later explained in Iwata Asks that the next joint project was chosen as an RPG, the genre in which Monolith Soft was strongest. As Disaster entered its final stage, employees gradually moved over to Xenoblade.

Participants in an interview about Xenoblade's development. Hitoshi Yamagami, Genki Yokota, and Koh Kojima are seated in the center. Nintendo and Monolith Soft began collaborating during Disaster and continued with the studio's next game.
Nintendo / participants in Iwata Asks about Xenoblade's development / Nintendo

This does not mean that Xenoblade appeared instead of Disaster 2. The projects overlapped, and Monolith Soft worked on several games at once. Even so, the genre choice is understandable: with Xenoblade, the studio could rely on its own experience instead of once again learning an unfamiliar type of game.

Ono, meanwhile, moved on to other projects. After Disaster, he led a group of Monolith Soft employees who assisted Nintendo with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Ono worked on planning, level design, and side quests before moving into mobile game development. His departure did not by itself mean that a sequel could never happen: Nintendo owns the Disaster rights, and other members of the original staff remained at the studio. But Monolith Soft lost the person who had conceived the first game, written its story, and already discussed a second installment with the producer.

Weak sales, the lack of a North American release, and the expensive development of the first game, which had to be almost completely restarted, added further problems. None of these reasons alone made a sequel impossible. Together, however, they greatly reduced the likelihood that Nintendo would fund a second game.

What Remains of Disaster 2

Almost eighteen years have passed since then. As of August 2, 2026, Nintendo has announced neither a sequel nor a remaster of Disaster: Day of Crisis. Monolith Soft's official catalog contains only the original Wii game, released on September 25, 2008. It makes no mention of a DS version, another action game starring Ray, or a canceled Disaster 2.

The studio has not forgotten the game itself, however. For its 25th anniversary, Monolith Soft prepared a series of official illustrations featuring characters from different projects. Raymond Bryce received his own wallpaper alongside characters from Xenoblade, Xenosaga, and Baten Kaitos. Ray's inclusion in the anniversary series shows that Monolith Soft still remembers Disaster.

Raymond Bryce in an official Monolith Soft anniversary illustration from 2024. Sixteen years after release, the studio still treated Disaster as part of its history, even though no new game had appeared.
Monolith Soft / 25th anniversary wallpaper featuring Raymond Bryce / Monolith Soft

So did Disaster 2 exist? If we are talking about plans for a second game, then yes. Nintendo and Monolith Soft really did discuss a sequel. The studio submitted a proposal, and Ono was already considering which mechanics could be expanded. Two interviews from 2008 confirm all of this.

But if we mean a full game that entered development and was later canceled, there is still no answer. The unannounced Action/Wii project in Ono's résumé remains the best candidate, but public sources do not allow us to identify it confidently as Disaster 2.

That is why the story of Disaster 2 remains interesting. There is no prototype, no working title, and no official cancellation announcement—only a few comments from the developers, one line in a résumé, and the movement of part of the Disaster staff to Xenoblade.

In Disaster itself, Ray escaped catastrophe at the last possible moment again and again. The sequel never even made it as far as an official announcement.