In the original version of Saints Row IV

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“ Saints Row IV had a dragon.

“We wanted Stephen Colbert to be the President,” Volition creative director Steve Jaros tells IGN. “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.” he says. “It was badass,but finally it was like, f**k it, you’re the President. Why give it to someone else?”Numerous things changed between the initial Saints Row IV concept and what we have now. Stephen Colbert as the President of the United States of America is the least crazy of the lot.As you may recall, Saints Row The Third’s last add-on content was to be Enter the Dominatrix , an expansion that later rolled up into Saints Row IV, which began production toward the end of its predecessor’s development cycle. Combining the two projects caused problems, however.“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,” Jaros explains. “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.”Following the release of Saints Row IV, Volition will release an add-on with multiple missing pieces, just for kicks, to show you what might have been. Which of those pieces remains to be seen. Will Colbert make it? Sounds unlikely.“We tried to make offers,” says Jaros. “Sometimes you get things that come really, really close. Or the money doesn’t work out. Or they’re not interested.”So what else didn’t make it into this version of Saints Row IV?“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.”I ask if there’s anything Volition ever says “no” to.“We had a gun, and I’m not even s**tting you, that summoned monkeys with hammers," Jaros responds.It gets even sillier.“Saints Row IV had a dragon." It was ultimately cut because, well, it was too much, and it didn’t really work.The nonsense included in the current version of Saints Row IV -- including a dubstep gun -- impressed IGN despite the absence of Colbert, The Rock, a dragon, and Meryl Streep.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. This was the best interview he's ever had. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN