So I found an ancient video of KS on NicoNico.

[Mythic]

This has got to be, THE oldest video of Katawa Shoujo on the internet. It features the intro scene for Rin and shows how massively different the direction for Katawa Shoujo was in 2008.
(You need an account to access NicoNico) http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2457518

[ogorhan]

Wow, it looks and sounds like a totally different game. Shows how far KS has come from

[Mirage_GSM]

I'm not going to wast my bandwidth to click the link, but since the first thing that was officially released was the demo in 2009, this is either fan work or from that early version that was illegally leaked.
I suggest you remove the link before one of the devs does it for you.

[Silentcook]

Grid1 has been out on the Web for so long that we stopped caring about its dissemination ages ago. Heck, I think we even put up a link to it at some point.

[Aura]

This is a prototype build from August 2007. It wasn't a leak, even though the build wasn't really meant for wide circulation. It was publically and freely available from our IRC channel, we just didn't "release" it, and later on we removed the download.

Besides, thanks to the slight surge in attention the project got from it, we managed to recruit a couple of valuable members like delta and skim (and maybe indirectly later on Silentcook, the final artist team and others, who knows).

[Mythic]

The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of text as they moved through the screen. What did they look like? The Music? And Backgrounds? Were the writers like always? I kept dreaming of a VN I thought I'd never see. And then one day... I got in! honya-ch.com/downloads/KatawaShojoGrid1.zip

Seriously though, it's amazing how much it evolved.

[Mirage_GSM]

Why should that be amazing?

Computer games usually change drastically from prototype builds to the finished product. Here, have some screenshots from the early development phase of WoW. (Page is German but the screeens themselves are English.)

It would have been amazing if KS had looked the same back then as when it was finally released.

As for Grid 1 being official, I thought that was what that item in the forum rules was talking about:

- Don't post links to pirated or otherwise illegal software anywhere on this forum. As a special case, this includes discussion and links to the existing illegitimate leak of KS's alpha files.

[Oddball]

- Don't post links to pirated or otherwise illegal software anywhere on this forum. As a special case, this includes discussion and links to the existing illegitimate leak of KS's alpha files.

I thought that was a reference to the script that I can't say anything more about here without getting into trouble.

Grid1 has been openly discussed here on the forum a few time. I recommend people tracking it down and checking it out just to see how much things changed.

[FeroxAnima]

Why should that be amazing?

Computer games usually change drastically from prototype builds to the finished product.

I personally don't think something has to be unusual for it to be amazing! Maybe there's something wrong with me but I find myself amazed by the night sky just about every time I look at it.
Besides, I believe what's being grasped as amazing here isn't just that there was progress, but rather the progress itself - being able to see and appreciate it is different than just hearing or rationally knowing that it took place. (Correct me if I'm wrong, though. I'm just tossing logical-sounding ideas into the air here. I personally didn't even play through Grid1, for various reasons.)