Overview: Shadow of the Colossus ~ DemoThe thing I love most about
Shadow of the Colossus is its sense of exploration. Climbing through ancient ruins, navigating your horse over dangerous cliffs, and swimming in lakes where hidden horrors may lurk... what a great atmosphere this game has! However, would you like to see what the game looked like in an earlier form filled with bugs, glitches, and the like? Of course you would!
If you manage to hunt down a particular demo disc you can play the E3 demo of the game. It only features a limited area to explore and one colossus to fight but that won't stop you if you want to explore what isn't meant to be seen.

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The picture you see above is a demo disc that was mailed with the
Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine; Issue 97. (Disc serial number: SCUS 97449). This disc contains the demo you need to explore the glitchiest, bug-ridden version of
Shadow that you'll probably ever play. (I believe there are a couple other demo discs that contain this demo as well but I cannot remember what they are.)
The Demo's ContentsThe whole point of the demo is to leave the shrine, head south, and defeat the first colossus. After that the demo will end.
But why do that when you can climb the shrine? Climb the shrine? Yes!
To reach the top of the shrine in the retail release you would normally have to either A) exploit a climbing glitch (present in the demo) or B) play the game enough until your stamina goes into god-status.
The climbing glitch allows you to climb as high as you want without losing any stamina. In order to achieve this you must constantly do climbing-jumps in the diagonal directions (Up-right; Up-left). Once you figure out this trick you can get to the garden.
Well, what's up there?If you made it to the top... congratulations! You now get to explore the game in its unfinished state. The developers probably assumed you weren't going to climb up there with such a small stamina bar but thanks to the climbing glitch you can view the garden in its incomplete state.
Things of notable interestI'm not going to go into great detail as you can do a youtube search of "Shadow of the Colossus Demo Secrets" (or other similar searches) and see everything but I'll mention a few things.
1) Incomplete Areas- Graphically and physically this entire area is unstable. The water canal is nothing but a glitchy hole. The textures are not quite right. You can fall through some walls. If you want to explore this area you'll probably end up having to reset quite often due to falling/death. That means another climb up the shrine.
2) Secret Areas- Through a couple walls you can access secret areas. Do that youtube search and see what I mean.
3) A decapitated character model- I'm not joking. This thing is creepy. It has no physical presence so you can just walk right through it. What is it doing here?? Is it a sick joke from the developers?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUCnztTVV9o---
Well that's pretty much an overview of the Demo. I'll explore the demo some more and post my findings/glitches.