According to an interview with IGN, Volition's creative director Steve Jaros and the rest of the Saints Row IV team had a lot more in mind than what we saw in the recent reveal trailer.

For one, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert was to be the president. As Jaros tells it:

“We wanted Stephen Colbert to be the President. I have concept art that’s amazing. It’s Stephen Colbert on a battlefield holding the American flag, his sleeves are ripped off, he’s got a bald eagle tattoo. That’s Steven Jr. It was badass, but finally it was like, f**k it, you’re the President. Why give it to someone else?”

There was also going to be two more celebrity cameos: the Rock--or at least, his spirit and personality--and Meryl Streep.

“I wrote a State of the Union address that was from the point of view of The Rock,” Jaros explains. He also “really wanted Meryl Streep so badly in Saints Row. I wanted her so badly for this game. There’s a role, I’m not going to tell you what she was going to be, but I think where we ended up is so much of a better joke.”

As to whether they'll ever make it: probably not. Jaros says:

“We tried to make offers Sometimes you get things that come really, really close. Or the money doesn’t work out. Or they’re not interested.”

Saints Row IV
Saints Row IV

Merging the "Enter the Dominatrix" expansion into Saints Row IV wasn't easy either, according to Jaros. The cast, cutscenes, dialogue, game features, missions scripting, and more, had to get revised, or even trashed entirely to make it all work, probably explaining the incredibly insane premise for Saints Row IV.

“Merging them was not a drag and drop proposition. There were things we were doing on Dominatrix that just wouldn’t make sense in Saints Row IV. Then even the stuff we wanted to take from Dominatrix to move in to Saints Row IV had to be totally redone because the story wouldn’t make any sense.

“[We] tossed ‘em all, because it wasn’t what we needed. That’s where we’re basing the Director’s Cut DLC on – elements we really liked but didn’t make a whole lot of sense to put them in the game.”

At least we know there's DLC coming, as if we didn't know that already.

On a few other things Saints Row IV wanted to offer:

“We had a gun, and I’m not even s**tting you, that summoned monkeys with hammers," Jaros responds.

Saints Row IV also had a dragon, ultimately cut to either time or design restraints, most likely. But will the DLC offer a dragon, a monkey gun (though it doesn't beat a Shark Gun), and the Rock? At least we're getting a "Dubstep Gun," whatever that is.

And what else would you like to see in Saints Row IV?

Saints Row IV is set to release in North America on August 20th, and worldwide on the 23rd, to the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

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