Final Fantasy 7 An oral history

An inside look at the creation and fallout of Square's industry-defining role-playing game, as told by those who were there.

We are saving your place in the story as you read.

Today, it sits above a Doutor coffee shop a few doors from a train station in a busy part of Hiyoshi, Yokohama.

Visit the building and you won’t see a plaque commemorating the history or remnants of a company whose characters now model Louis Vuitton clothes and sell millions of games. Yet on that spot in 1983, inside his father’s office space, founder Masafumi Miyamoto began a development studio called Square.

Initially, it wasn’t even a formally-designated company. It was a room where people came and went.

Some describe the company in its early days as a family business. One of Square’s first hires, Shinichiro Kajitani, joined simply because he was friends with Miyamoto and compares the young studio to a college club. Another, Hironobu Sakaguchi, designed games while working part time.

“We treated it like a hobby, not a career,” says longtime Square composer Nobuo Uematsu. “We just wanted to do what we liked. We weren’t worried about our salaries or living situations or thinking, ‘Where is this company going?’”

But people grow up and things change.

Original Square building

In 2017, a salon called Mod’s Hair Paris fills the space where Square started more than 30 years earlier. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

After a few early successes and stumbles, Square found a hit in the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games. Moved into progressively larger offices. Hired hundreds of people. Built a portfolio.

“Eventually Square’s stock went public, and Sakaguchi-san and people on the management side had to focus hard on the financial goals they had to reach, the unit numbers that they had to hit,” says Uematsu.

“That whole mentality started to change around the time of Final Fantasy 7.”

When Final Fantasy 7 shipped in 1997, it was Square’s cash cow. The game pioneered 3D graphics techniques, helped Sony’s PlayStation outperform its competitors, established Japanese RPGs in the West and went on to sell more than 11 million copies. To many fans, it defined Square as a company.

Team members describe it as a perfect storm, when Square still acted like a small company but had the resources of a big one — and was willing to pour its money into one of the game industry’s most ambitious projects right as the 3D graphics industry began to take off.

“I don’t think I’ve felt that kind of excitement ever since,” says programmer Hiroshi Kawai. “It wasn’t just the fact that Square had the resources to get all the people and the hardware and the technology together, but even before seeing anything run, it was as if we knew we were going to be making history.”

With Final Fantasy 7 now approaching its 20th anniversary and a high-profile PlayStation 4 remake in development, we decided to look back.

Over the past two years, Polygon tracked down more than 30 people who had a hand in the original game and asked them to tell the story of its creation. Below, in their words, you’ll find a story about a company in transition — and the money, politics and talent that pushed it over the edge.

Final Fantasy 7: The origins

The man behind Final Fantasy

Without Hironobu Sakaguchi, Square might not exist today.

In the mid-’80s, shortly after Square started out, the company was still finding its footing in the game industry. It had developed a string of modestly successful PC titles, but when Nintendo’s Famicom console came along in Japan (i.e. the Nintendo Entertainment System in the U.S.), Square decided to gamble heavily on the new machine. It showered the console with games, hoping to see strong returns. But, initially, they didn’t come. The team ran low on money and showed signs it might fold.

When Square’s first Final Fantasy game hit the Famicom in 1987, that luck started to change. Thanks to an elaborate story and high-end production values, the role-playing series went on to become one of the biggest successes on Nintendo’s console — and then on its successor, the Super Famicom. In the late ’80s, the series pulled Square out of financial trouble. By the ’90s, it was the rocket almost everyone at the company grabbed onto.

For Final Fantasy creator Sakaguchi, it marked a prosperous time. He moved up the ranks as the top creative figure at Square (intermittently known as Squaresoft), becoming an executive vice president and a game industry celebrity. In interviews looking back, he downplays his level of authority at the time, while others speak of him as someone who ran the show and made multimillion dollar decisions more or less on a whim.

[Editor’s note: For interviewees who worked on the PlayStation version of Final Fantasy 7, we’ve listed their job titles from the time of the game’s release in 1997. For those involved in other parts of this story, we’ve listed their relevant titles next to the years they held those jobs.]

Motonori Sakakibara

Movie director, Square

In the late ’90s, all the game companies had lots of money — especially Square, of course. So Square prioritized quality rather than obsessing over costs. That was how Sakaguchi-san operated. He always asked for a lot from the team and gave us tight schedules, but he backed up those requests with big teams and the best hardware. That was a very rare situation. He was always looking at a big vision, but at the same time, how to make it a reality.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

He was always looking at the future and always had a big-picture vision. He was never satisfied with what he was currently working on.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

I think calling him a god would be going too far, but it kind of felt like that. He was a superstar.

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

I remember us calling him “The King.” … No, not to his face.

Junichi Yanagihara

Executive vice president, Square USA

Well, he was the king, in a good way. I think that might have started as an email address where he didn’t want to use his own name, so he just used “king” and then some number combination. And that’s how we started saying, “OK, he’s the king.”

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

Yeah, “king,” yeah. [Laughs] Actually, you know, at most of the management meetings at Squaresoft in Japan, without him, there were no decisions made. He told the management committee when a game was going to be completed and what kind of marketing he wanted to have. So yeah, he was the king. He was controlling the entire operation.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

“King?” Is that from Square U.S.? … Those punks. [Laughs] Yeah, I remember being called that at one point. The actual meaning is very different, though. There was a time when I really drank a lot of champagne, so I got the nickname “Champagne King.” That’s where it came from. It didn’t have anything to do with my work. And I don’t drink like that anymore.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

The creator of the Final Fantasy series, Hironobu Sakaguchi became Square’s first industry celebrity. Many credit him with not only keeping Square from going under in the late ’80s, but also with being ahead of the curve by moving Final Fantasy into 3D, online play and the film industry. After completing the film “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” he left Square and founded production studio Mistwalker. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I think the way he works is very aggressive sometimes. But he understood the creative elements and also the management issues [at Square] … And he worked very closely with key members of the development team, which no other management members of Squaresoft could do.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

He’s very politically adept. Some of it, perhaps, could be real manipulation; some of it could be something on a more motivational side. But he knows how to get people to do things for him.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

I wouldn’t say he made arbitrary decisions, but he tended to make pretty big decisions pretty quickly and easily. I got the feeling he made decisions based on what inspired him at the time. Something would just kind of hit him and he’d be like, “OK, we’ve got to do this.”

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

I guess my style can be a little haphazard. One morning I might say to the staff, “Do it this way.” And then when they show me what they’ve done, which is what I asked for, I’ll get mad: “Why is it like this?!” That kind of thing happens from time to time. The thing is, my thoughts are always in flux, swirling around and changing in my head, so I might shoot off 10 emails in a row on the same subject. Send an email, change my mind, send another email, think about it some more.

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

He’s the father of Final Fantasy. He created this series. And so it was kind of easy for me and probably everyone else on our team to just kind of believe in his creation and be able to stand by it and really commit ourselves.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I think the golden days of Sakaguchi were when he was developing Final Fantasy 7. And most of the decisions he made paid off.

Square’s first attempt at making Final Fantasy 7

By the early ’90s, Square had an unqualified hit with the Final Fantasy series in Japan, a growing stable of games and enough breathing room to experiment. Sakaguchi took the opportunity to dabble in a series of ambitious projects, including a high-profile collaboration with the creator of role-playing series Dragon Quest and the artist behind manga series Dragon Ball. Their result was an RPG called Chrono Trigger.

Meanwhile, after six Final Fantasy games on Nintendo hardware, Sakaguchi had begun to step away from working in the trenches on the series. Square team members Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura had begun to take leadership roles over day-to-day work on the Final Fantasy series, seeing through Sakaguchi’s high-level plans and story ideas. Kitase had long been a film buff who liked the parallels between film and game storytelling. Nomura came to the series as an artist, gradually taking on more creative responsibility.

Final Fantasy 7 was an obvious next step, but with console hardware advancing quickly, Square wasn’t sure how to approach the game. It could play things safe and stick to the 2D pixel art style of previous games; it could risk a new art style on aging hardware; it could dabble with early 3D graphics on new machines. Ideas spilled in every direction, and over the course of two years the company took three distinct attempts at getting the game off the ground.

The first of those three was a direct 2D sequel to Final Fantasy 6 for Super Famicom.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

At the time, it wasn’t clear yet whether Japanese RPGs were going to go 3D or not. Sakaguchi-san was especially fond of pixel art, and we debated a lot about whether we should remain in that 2D style. … After we finished Final Fantasy 6, we began working on Final Fantasy 7 [as a 2D game for Super Famicom], brainstorming and holding initial planning meetings.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

1994? Ah, oh … that … wait, what? Kitase said that? Are you sure he’s not just making it up? No, I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t remember that. Maybe he meant that he had the idea in his head.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

I think we had about 60 people in total working on Final Fantasy 6. When we started preproduction for FF7 [on Super Famicom], it was probably a little smaller than that, maybe 20-30 people.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

We were working pretty slowly on it. Maybe for a few months?

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

About two to three months.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

At that early point we were all still going back and forth about what the story should be. Nothing had been clearly decided on yet. … [In] the first plot treatment that Sakaguchi-san wrote, it took place in New York, there was an organization there that was trying to destroy the Mako Reactors and a character named Detective Joe was investigating them. There were other characters involved, too. One of the members of this organization trying to destroy the reactor was the prototype character for [eventual FF7 main character] Cloud.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

I think I remember that you wrote some concept/planning documents too, right?

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I did. I did.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

But at that time Chrono Trigger’s development was in dire straits, so all the team members switched over to help with Chrono Trigger … and that’s as far as it went.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

Ah, yes, that’s right. I remember now. It was when we consolidated everyone on Chrono Trigger. That’s right. Before we made Chrono Trigger, we had talked about making FF7, but then we moved everyone over to the Chrono Trigger team. I do recall now; I did write a scenario for FF7, a different story [than the one we eventually used]. I don’t remember it being in New York though. You know, I think the New York idea might be from Parasite Eve. And Joe, that’s actually the original name I had for the protagonist from Lost Odyssey. I don’t know, maybe all this information is getting mixed up somewhere.

Yoshinori Kitase

With Final Fantasy 6, Yoshinori Kitase took over as the series’ director. And when Final Fantasy 7 came around, he fell into the same role. Team members describe Kitase as calmer and quieter than many high-profile game developers and say that his cinematic sensibilities played a big role in shaping FF7’s CG cutscenes. In the years following FF7’s release, Kitase stayed at Square, directing and producing many of the biggest Final Fantasy games. In 2017, he’s working as the producer of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Final Fantasy 25th: Memorial Ultimata Vol.2

In 2012, Square Enix released an art book in Japan called “Final Fantasy 25th: Memorial Ultimata Vol.2,” covering the history of Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 9. Inside, the book shows Square’s early Final Fantasy 7 prototype for Super Famicom and other development experiments. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

An early experiment in 3D graphics

Setting aside work on the Super Famicom version of Final Fantasy 7, Square began to explore options for where to take the series in 3D. In 1994, that was a new concept for the company, and most of its staff had only been trained to make games in 2D. So rather than jump in head first, Square decided to put together a small experiment.

Using high-end machines from 3D hardware powerhouse Silicon Graphics, Inc., Square put together a tech demo showing what the characters from Final Fantasy 6 could look like in a 3D battle scene. Team members say they always thought of the demo as a research project rather than as something they’d sell to players one day.

Behind the scenes, the process of making a 3D tech demo started with Kazuyuki Hashimoto, an engineer who had experience in early 3D game development working with companies like Sega, Nintendo and Sony.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

Prior to Final Fantasy 7 … we didn’t have anyone on staff to do 3D graphics. Then I met [Hashimoto], who is my best friend to this day, and he helped me find a very talented crew to head up the visuals. It was their first time working on a game, and it was our first time working with 3D graphics.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

At that time, I also had invites from other companies. But I wasn’t interested. Sakaguchi-san was different. I think he’s talented. He has something. I don’t know what he has, but he has something. … He has the talent or ability to see what will happen in the future.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

We knew Nintendo 64 and PlayStation were going to be the next hardware generation, and that we’d be developing our next game for one of them. It was similar to when we moved from the Famicom to the Super Famicom. Our first step wasn’t to choose between the two systems, but to focus on learning the Silicon Graphics workstations we had purchased. They were very expensive machines, and we made a demo on them to show people, “This is how Final Fantasy could look in 3D.”

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

Square planned to build a game for the next-gen Nintendo machine, but the [development] kit wasn’t available and the technical [specs kept changing]. So I suggested we could go with a standard environment and we could see what we could do with it. Then later on we could optimize this idea to the small machine. Initially, we could do something with the most powerful environment so we could be more free — free to figure out what we could do in 3D.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

Back then, it was a big step from 2D to 3D. And it was difficult even in my head to picture what the battle scenes should look like.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

Square was very new to the 3D graphics industry, so Silicon Graphics didn’t pay much attention to us. After we made this demo, we wanted to show it at the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, and we couldn’t bring over a machine from Japan [because it was too large]. We needed to lease a rental from the SGI headquarters, and they didn’t recognize us. But I had a friend at Silicon Graphics in the U.S., and I asked him to coordinate a loan, so we successfully loaned one machine for the demonstration.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

One of the key figures behind Final Fantasy 7’s tech, Kazuyuki Hashimoto joined Square in 1995 with a background in 3D graphics from computer manufacturer Symbolics. At Square, he set up a new graphics pipeline and hired a team of engineers, initially working on the Final Fantasy 6: The Interactive CG Game tech demo. After finishing his work on that and FF7, he played a similar role in building a pipeline and team for Square’s Honolulu studio working on the movie “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” then left the company once the Honolulu studio closed. Following his time at Square, he joined Electronic Arts to help it get a handle on early PlayStation 3 hardware, then became president of a Hawaii-based startup called Avatar Reality. In 2012, he joined tech giant Nvidia. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

product shot of final fantasy 7

After showing Final Fantasy 6: The Interactive CG Game at the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, Square recorded footage of it and distributed that to players on this disc at the 1996 Tokyo Game Show. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

Because I was the only developer [on the team who spoke English], I was tasked with manning the booth and explaining how the game worked at Siggraph. While the demo had only one battle, I remember it being fun to play. … I remember most people wanting a second or third go to figure out the right pattern of commands to win the game.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

There wasn’t that big of a crowd. We made it so people could draw a symbol on the screen to cast a spell or call out a dragon. And they were interested in the visuals, but the mechanics seemed to confuse them.

Michael Jones

Engineering director, Silicon Graphics (1992-1999)

Their user interface was a gestural interface. So you’d make the Zorro “Z” and that meant something. And you’d make a circle and that meant something. This was gestures as understood by storytelling game people, not gestures as understood by Microsoft working on operating system UI or something. It was much more aggressive and imaginative, and maybe a little less reasonable, but more fun. You know, if a computer company had made a pinball machine, they would have had a button that says “push” or “launch” or “click” or something, but if you had a game designer, it would have a big spring and a thing you pull back on.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

People at the show didn’t understand what they were looking at. A lot of them were interested in high-tech engineering or military-related things for business purposes, and we demonstrated this game just for fun. People said, “Oh, interesting.” That’s it. But I still remember Michael Jones at SGI came to visit because we used this technology, and he was so impressed that he said SGI really wanted to demonstrate the application in its headquarters in Mountain View, [Calif.]. And we gave him the executable to demonstrate the game at the SGI headquarters. He went on to became the head of Keyhole. Do you know what that is? It’s Google Earth. Anyway, small world.

Michael Jones

Engineering director, Silicon Graphics (1992-1999)

What I liked about it, just personally, was that even though they were advanced technically, they were actually faithful — unlike other video games — they were faithful to anime. You know, in “Akira,” the guy raises his fist up in the air and something happens, right? In video games of the day, [they sort of had] a poor take on that. So this game was, “Let’s make a computer game that looks like the art form that inspired this game.”

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

At the time when you were talking about computer graphics, people wanted to see something very realistic, something that you could throw into a live action movie and they couldn’t tell the difference. But we used CG to represent anime characters. Because of that, I think a lot of people at the show weren’t very interested in it. But that’s what we wanted to do.

Michael Jones

Engineering director, Silicon Graphics (1992-1999)

We had a lot of customers who did crazy things. Customers that simulated nuclear reactors. Customers that taught astronauts to fly a space shuttle. All these kinds of lunatic fringe applications, they liked using our computers, and often they liked using my team’s software. And in particular, machines like that, even if they’re kind of over the top as far as what a gamer would use, they’re great for game designers and developers because they can simulate interactively what would later on take maybe a year to code up to be interactive on a PC or something. … You know, you can practice basically by using a computer of super power. … And so that’s what Square had done, pretty much.

Square’s second attempt at making Final Fantasy 7

With Chrono Trigger behind it and work on the Final Fantasy Siggraph tech demo underway, Square began to take steps toward a second attempt at making Final Fantasy 7, following the abandoned Super Famicom project. Square had long been a Nintendo ally, making most of its games exclusively for Nintendo’s systems, so many at the company assumed they would follow whatever Nintendo did next and make games for the company’s next console, Nintendo 64.

Nintendo even had a partnership with Silicon Graphics for its Nintendo 64 hardware, making for what some thought would be a natural transition using the company’s experience from the Siggraph demo.

Square began to put together a plan for what a 3D Final Fantasy 7 could look like on Nintendo 64. The concept involved making the game for Nintendo’s 64DD peripheral, a disc drive add-on that ended up only shipping in Japan and never took off commercially. Square team members say they wanted to include lengthy cutscenes and large amounts of content in the game, which would have been difficult in the limited space of a Nintendo 64 cartridge, but that the plan never got far enough into development to have anything substantial to show publicly.

Nomura and Kitase

Shortly after speaking on stage at Sony’s PlayStation Experience event in 2015, Final Fantasy 7 director Yoshinori Kitase and artist/writer Tetsuya Nomura joked around in Polygon’s San Francisco office. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

It wasn’t really “officially” in development for the Nintendo 64. It was more like we were experimenting with the hardware.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

[Nintendo] actually started giving us emulation kits for the 64. They weren’t running on anything reasonably sized. Do you know what an SGI Onyx looks like? A little smaller than [a 4’x4’] table. … I only had very simple demos running on it at the time, trying to port over some of the higher-resolution models that we used for the Siggraph demo to see how they would perform. … I was [also] using a 3D model of a Leviathan guardian that definitely wasn’t part of the FF6 Siggraph demo.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

We started making a demo to see what was possible, and only a handful of people worked on it: a few programmers, and four or five artists to work on the graphics. Those artists may have forgotten by now, but the first characters we had them work on were Cloud, Barret and Red XIII [all of whom ended up in the final version of FF7].

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I remember working on them and revising their initial designs. Cloud and Barret were too short, so I made them taller. Yeah, the three of them were probably the first characters we made.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

A small group of us worked on those ideas in secret and gradually added more people.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

It all took place in one room too, I remember.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Yeah. It was a single room segregated from everyone else. Very few people knew about and worked on the project. It was all hush-hush. As for the main bulk of the work on that demo, maybe it took a month or two?

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

It’s hard to say what the exact time frame was. There wasn’t a schedule, really.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Nomura, do you remember, when we were making that SGI demo for the Nintendo 64, that the first thing you created was the Behemoth CG model?

It was a single room segregated from everyone else. Very few people knew about and worked on the project. It was all hush-hush. Yoshinori Kitase

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I did? In polygons?

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Whenever we’re doing research and development on a new Final Fantasy game, we usually select Behemoth as a test model of sorts. For the Nintendo 64 demo, it took 2,000 polygons to render him.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I don’t remember that at all.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

You don’t? But you designed him! [Laughs] Anyway, we made a 2,000-count polygon version of Behemoth for the Nintendo 64, but when we rendered and animated it, the framerate was way too low. To properly display Behemoth with that technology, we needed 2,000 polygons, but it was a little too much for the hardware. That was part of the problem with choosing Nintendo.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

All this work was toward — I think they called it the Shoshinkai, Nintendo’s Space World [trade show in Japan]. And here I am coding, kind of being able to do lead dev work for this Space World demo. Then I think it was near the end of the year. Sakaguchi-san just gathers everybody in the middle of this gigantic floor where we had a bunch of devs working in the middle of Meguro. And he just casually announces, “You know, we’re not developing for Nintendo anymore.” … So all my work at that point kind of went down the drain.

Square leaves Nintendo, aligns with Sony

In the Super Famicom era, Nintendo had a chokehold on many of the big Japanese third-party game studios. Companies like Capcom, Konami and Square played key roles in Nintendo’s success, and prioritized Nintendo’s hardware over Sega’s Mega Drive (Genesis in the U.S.).

As Nintendo 64 and PlayStation arrived, that grip began to loosen. Despite Sony having an unproven track record in the game industry, its developer outreach and hardware convinced many third-party teams to hop on board. Square was one of the biggest studios to jump ship, announcing in early 1996 that it had decided to shift its entire lineup to Sony’s hardware, with Final Fantasy 7 as the centerpiece.

By the end of the generation, almost all major third-party studios had signed up with Sony, in part due to the economic advantages of manufacturing games on PlayStation’s CDs compared to Nintendo 64’s cartridges.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

[In September 1995] I was hired by the president of the company, [Tetsuo] Mizuno-san, and he told me that, “Squaresoft will always be with Nintendo. … As long as you work for us, it’s basically the same as working for Nintendo.” And the week after I joined, they started saying, “Oh, maybe we should switch to Sony.” So I was kind of shocked.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I remember walking down the hall when Sakaguchi-san stopped me and said, “Hey, look at this!” He was wearing this jumper jacket, and he turned around and showed me the PlayStation logo on the back. I stood there kind of dumbfounded. … I was pretty low on the totem pole at Square back then, so I couldn’t really say anything in response — and in any event, even if he had talked to me about it, I was only in a position to nod and agree with him.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

I think [we announced the move to Sony with] a TV commercial, right?

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Ah, yeah. I think so. It was kind of unusual to use a TV commercial to announce that a game was under development … We don’t do that kind of announcement nowadays.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

I also remember that we put an ad out in Shonen Jump [magazine], which had a circulation of six million people. We put that out at the same time we released the TV ad, and I think together they had a huge impact.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

Square was a bet-the-company kind of company. It was a big risk to put Final Fantasy 7 on the PlayStation. … Nobody had confidence in PlayStation. Nobody knew whether it would work, and most people thought that it wouldn’t. And the early pictures that came out, when it looked like a toilet bowl, confirmed everybody’s suspicions.

Yoshitaka Amano

Image illustrator, freelance

That must have been a huge decision for [Sakaguchi] to make. But he did it, and from there the series grew dramatically. It’s amazing that he was able to do that and make it work. He did that all for the game, his series. That must have been a really tough time for him.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

I think it was a very difficult time for our president and for Sakaguchi-san.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

Of course, back then I wasn’t the president of Square. There was a management level above me, and I talked with them to make the decision. But PlayStation games being on CDs was the biggest factor. If you wanted to make a 3D action game on a Nintendo 64 cartridge with that limited space, you could do it. But I wanted to create a 3D role-playing game. It was very clear in my head what I wanted to make, but that would have been difficult on Nintendo’s hardware. …

The biggest problem was, of course, memory. Based on our calculations there was no way it could all fit on a ROM cartridge. So our main reason for choosing the PlayStation was really just because it was the only console which would allow us to use CD-ROM media.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

Also CDs were cheaper than cartridges, so we were thinking we could provide more to players without raising the price. That was another big part of the appeal.

Tomoyuki Takechi

In 1990, while working at Shikoku Bank, Tomoyuki Takechi started working with Square to help manage its finances. That led to him helping Square go public in 1994, and then joining the company in 1996 — right when Square was deciding whether to make FF7 for Nintendo or Sony hardware. As president and and chief executive officer at Square, he led negotiations with Sony for Square to publish Final Fantasy 7 on PlayStation. In 2000, he became Square’s chairman, and in 2001 he left to take responsibility for the company taking a financial loss. Following his time at Square, he has worked as president of development studio AQ Interactive and served on the boards of various companies in and related to the game industry. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

[Note: While many people speaking for this story point to this often-told story about the differences between CD-ROMs and cartridges as the main reason for Square’s shift to PlayStation, some say hardware horsepower differences and communication between Square and Nintendo also played a key role in the decision. Kawai says he believes Square has focused its public comments on the disc versus cartridge debate over the years out of respect to Nintendo.]

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

Around that time, Sony approached us, and they told us, “We have the PlayStation coming out and we want to make 3D games. Would you guys be interested?” And at the time, since we were really close to Nintendo, we said, “Well, we’re not sure. We’re pretty much just working with them.” And I asked if it was OK to share that information with Nintendo. And Sony said, “That’s totally fine. Go ahead and show it to them. We just want you to see what we’re doing, and if you like it, then by all means, come work with us on this.” It’s not that we were passing information back and forth between Nintendo and Sony, but at the time our programmers … started making prototypes that ran on the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 as sort of benchmark software to test each system.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

We were trying to work out whether to do it with the Nintendo machine or not. … There was a while there where we were going back and forth between the N64 and PlayStation, seeing what we could do with 3D graphics on each system.

Motonori Sakakibara

Movie director, Square

I saw a couple of the tests, but it was obviously different. The quality was so different. So I thought they’d never take Nintendo because the result was very clear.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I kind of had a suspicion that things weren’t going too well for the 64 at that point, because … one of my responsibilities … was to write performance applications that compared how well the 64 fared against the prototype [PlayStation]. And we’d be running parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you’d have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second. And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]. Of course, the drawback of the [PlayStation] is it didn’t really have a z-buffer, so you’d have these overlapping polygons that you’d have to work around so that you wouldn’t get the shimmering [look]. But on the other hand, there was no way you’d be able to get anything close to what FF7 was doing [on PlayStation] on the 64 at that time.

There was actually this one trip that [Nintendo] organized for me, [main programmer Ken] Narita-san, a few other lead devs who were working on the battle portion for the Final Fantasy 6 [Siggraph] demo at that point. … I think Nintendo had been getting signals from Square saying, you know, “Your hardware isn’t up to snuff. Not only in terms of raw 3D performance, but in terms of storage.” And they said, “We’re gonna fabricate this brand new chip,” which was supposed to have a bunch of hardware improvements to get a little bit more performance. Which, my suspicion is they probably just repeated that verbatim from SGI, and I think there was, in general, a disconnect between SGI and Nintendo in terms of what they were expecting the hardware to do. SGI was probably talking more along theoretical lines of what the hardware would be able to do, and they were trying to make it general purpose so that it wasn’t just a 3D rendering machine. But Nintendo had certain specific performance metrics that had to be met, but I don’t think those were communicated well to SGI.

The wires just — they weren’t in sync there. So they sent us down to Mountain View, and I took all that code I was writing for the Shoshinkai to run on the [latest prototype] hardware there. And it didn’t really change in terms of performance.

Darren Smith

Project manager/manager, Nintendo of America (1993-2000)

In 1993, [Nintendo] asked me to take on the role leading at least the North American side of project management for the development of the next-generation console [which became Nintendo 64], and I found that the partner was Silicon Graphics. So I moved down to California and was the person from Nintendo on-site there full time, just kind of coordinating the work between Japan and what was going on on-site there at SGI. …

We definitely met with [Square]. We met with almost every single publisher out there, but really just to give them background on the technology, what it was capable of. Met with [Square] a couple of times. They came back with a demo of kind of what they found the technology was capable of doing, asked questions about how to optimize things. … I have a vague recollection of what they showed. From what I recall, the demo showed an increasing number of 2D bouncing balls with some textures mapped onto them. I don’t think they showed anything that showed gameplay, or even anything with their own [intellectual property] attached to it.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

We spent a few days, I remember, optimizing my code, to try to get a few more polygons out, but it didn’t really make much of a difference. And upon returning to Tokyo, there was a meeting with me, Narita-san, Sakaguchi-san and the major stakeholder of Square, Miyamoto-san. And I had never seen [Miyamoto in person before then]. He just comes in. “OK so, how was it?” And I gave a few figures when asked, but Narita-san was the main person who was talking. And he was essentially saying, “We’re just not getting the performance. We’re nowhere near what we did during the Siggraph demo.” Miyamoto-san just silently acknowledged that, and I didn’t hear anything from them until the point when Sakaguchi-san called [the office] together and said, “We’re not doing the 64 anymore.” So yeah. I guess in a sense, I kind of provided the objective data to say that the 64 wasn’t suitable for the next-gen Final Fantasy.

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

At that time, Square was really close to Nintendo — we were basically like a second party for them. So when their new system was in development, we gave them lots of advice, like, “You’re going to need a CD-ROM drive for it,” “You don’t have enough bandwidth to do what we’re trying to do,” and, “With what you have now, we’re not going to be able to make an RPG.” We gave them lots of advice. But [Nintendo president] Yamauchi-san at Nintendo basically refused to listen to any of it. And that’s when Sakaguchi-san and the management team at Square decided, “OK, we’re going to go with Sony now.”

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

We made our pitch as a team to the president and founder of Square, Miyamoto-san, because ultimately it was going to come down to whether it made business sense. Miyamoto-san encouraged us: If we, the software designers, were that confident that we could make a good game this way, then it would be strange to deny us this opportunity. He agreed that this was the way to go and told us to do as we saw fit.

Junichi Yanagihara

Executive vice president, Square USA

[Miyamoto-san] has this sort of business sense, a spontaneous reaction to something new. … Some people may take their time to think something through, whether it is a good idea for the company or not. I got the impression that Miyamoto-san is someone who just says, “Oh OK, I think this is a great idea. We’ll do it.” Rather than doing due diligence and so forth.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

Sony basically gave us the best deal they were giving to any publisher. And they did a lot of public relations work and marketing on their dime. They gave us a great deal to help convince us to come over. … I can’t talk about the details, but one thing I can say is that Sony went very low on the per-unit royalties that we had to pay.

Yusuke Naora

When starting at Square in the early ’90s, Yusuke Naora began work on Final Fantasy 6 without ever having played a role-playing game. A couple of years later he took on the role of Final Fantasy 7’s art director, and he then stayed with Square for two decades working on a large variety of games. In 2016, he finished his work as one of a team of art directors on Final Fantasy 15, overseeing the game’s characters, then left the company. As of a Polygon interview with him in July 2016, he said he hadn’t seen any more of Square’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake than the public had. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Shuhei Yoshida

Square account manager, Sony Computer Entertainment

I was actually one of the publisher relations [team members], an account manager of Square, so I know more than I can talk about. … It’s a long story getting into that announcement.

Yoshitaka Amano

Image illustrator, freelance

To be honest, [I don’t remember the shift to 3D being a big deal]. The thing I remember more was that Final Fantasy was no longer going to be a Famicom game; it was going to be a PlayStation game. That fact had more of an impact.

Shuhei Yoshida

Square account manager, Sony Computer Entertainment

It was amazing. Everything changed after. … Final Fantasy 7 and Dragon Quest 7 [from Square rival publisher Enix] was like a one-two [punch]. … At least for the Japanese market, that really made the PlayStation the most popular console for the generation.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

Politically it was a drastic change and a huge decision, but for me it was more of a natural decision because that was the hardware we needed to make the game.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

I thought it was the right decision, but yeah, there was a lot of [tension] with Nintendo after.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

It was pretty uncomfortable. There were about four to five years where we couldn’t really talk with Nintendo. We didn’t have a friendly relationship with them.

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

When we made the decision to go with Sony, for about 10 years we basically weren’t allowed into Nintendo’s offices. From a consumer’s point of view, it was good to have two companies competing with each other because prices wouldn’t rise and it would be better for them. But from a business perspective, our main interest was making sure that Sony won and Nintendo lost, basically, because that would be better for us.

George Harrison

Senior vice president, marketing and communications, Nintendo of America (1992-2007)

The period when PlayStation first arrived using CDs rather than cartridges was a tough period for Nintendo with publishers. Nintendo wanted to stay with cartridges to minimize counterfeiting but publishers wanted the extra capacity available on CDs. This was especially true for games like Final Fantasy with rich graphics.

Darren Smith

Project manager/manager, Nintendo of America (1993-2000)

I knew it was important [when Square left], and it certainly was a loss. But for me, it wasn’t such a devastating loss. I knew it was very important for [Nintendo in] Japan. I’m not so sure about the U.S. market. But we knew it was a big deal to have lost it on our system, and knowing that it would make Sony a bigger competitor, it just made the work that much more important.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I’ll say this. I’m impressed with what Nintendo [was] able to do with the 64 hardware. Mario, Zelda — their devs must be top notch to be able to do that. But that’s essentially the extent of what you can do with the hardware. And you would get nowhere near anything like a Final Fantasy running on it.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

When we made our decision, the president of Square [Masafumi Miyamoto], our lead programmer [Ken Narita] and I went to a meeting with Yamauchi-san. There is an old cultural tradition where, in Kyoto, someone will welcome you with tea, but you’re not supposed to really drink that tea. It’s just polite to have it there. And Yamauchi-san welcomed us with a very expensive bento meal and beer, and gave us a very nice welcome and basically patted us on the back to say, “I wish you the best.” No bitter feelings or anything.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I think [Sakaguchi] is just trying to be politically correct with that one.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I don’t think [anyone from Nintendo gave us a hard time]. They said, “Oh, we don’t need that.” That’s what they said. [Laughs] Their philosophy has always been that Nintendo hardware is for their games, and if a publisher wants to publish, “OK you can do it.” But if you don’t like it, “We don’t want you.”

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

What I heard was Nintendo said, “If you’re leaving us, never come back.”

Shinichiro Kajitani

One of Square’s first employees, Shinichiro Kajitani joined the team in 1986 on the same day as Nasir Gebelli, the programmer of the first three Final Fantasy games. Initially, Kajitani bounced between different roles, starting in sales, then dabbling in programming and production management. In the early ’90s, he helped Square with recruiting and oversaw administrative purchases for the company, later joining Square USA and sitting on the Square EA board. After leaving Square in 2002, he joined game publisher Capcom, then went to development studio Game Republic, which he eventually helped run as chief operating officer. When Game Republic went out of business in 2011, he took a role with development team/graphics tech company Silicon Studio. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

[Note: In October 2001, then Square president Hisashi Suzuki said in an interview that Nintendo became especially frustrated not when Square left, but later when Square helped convince others, such as Enix, to leave as well. Suzuki declined an interview request for this story.]

Final Fantasy 7: The game

After settling on its decision to leave Nintendo, Square moved quickly to make Final Fantasy 7 a reality on PlayStation, hiring a large 3D tech and art staff and purchasing hundreds of Silicon Graphics workstations. For many team members, that financial backing made all the difference, enabling them to outpace many of their competitors working in early 3D game development.

Meanwhile, Square put its top resources into the game’s art, music and plot, experimenting with the best ways to tell a story with polygonal characters and CG cutscenes. And it spent money to open a new Western sales and marketing office in the U.S. to help promote the game in territories where the series hadn’t yet taken off.

From front to back, Square spared little expense in its attempts to make and promote the game.

Square headquarters

Over the years, Square’s headquarters has bounced between a number of different offices. Shortly after starting work on Final Fantasy 7, the company moved into the Arco Tower in Meguro — a complex that could accommodate the additional staff Square needed to make the game. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Square spends big on Final Fantasy 7’s development

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

Final Fantasy 7 came very quickly; the development period was a little more than a year. That was very unusual at the time. … To shorten the development cycle, they invested hugely into the technology. The team expanded to close to 150 all of a sudden, from like 30-40 people.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

They had 150 people working on the game, which was a huge number. A normal game team was 20 at the time.

[Note: Some remember these numbers differently. In an interview for this story, director Yoshinori Kitase estimates that Final Fantasy 6’s development team had 60 people on it. And a 1997 issue of Japanese magazine Weekly Famitsu reports that Square used 200 people to develop FF7. Final Fantasy 6’s credits list 65 names, with 16 of those appearing in the Special Thanks section. Final Fantasy 7’s credits list more than 350 names, with over 200 of those from outsourcing partners and overseas offices.]

Junichi Yanagihara

Executive vice president, Square USA

Myself, Hashimoto-san and Kajitani-san were sort of three pals. We basically had to go around the world recruiting people.

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

I was involved in recruiting, yeah. … It wasn’t really that difficult, because starting around ‘92 or ‘93 we decided that because of the way the industry was going, we should start focusing more on 3D graphics. And at the time, there were magazines called Nikkei CG and Pixel, and we found about 100 or so names through those. So we went around talking to them. For one of those trips we actually went to Skywalker Ranch. I didn’t meet George Lucas myself, but I saw him off in the distance. At the time, there were only about 10 Japanese people working there in the film studio, but I went and talked to all of them.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

Do you know a company called Recruit in Japan? They’re pretty big. They publish a lot of magazines, but one of the most important magazines they publish is sort of like a help wanted magazine. [Like classified ads] but more extravagant. They do in-depth interviews with people in the company to sort of [show what it’s like to work somewhere]. Companies would sort of vie to get themselves listed in this magazine. [Square sent me a copy] out of the blue, and I think the reason was that I was one of the few Japanese speakers at MIT.

It was a very developer-friendly environment. … We were only able to do what we were doing because the company was financially healthy.Hiroshi Kawai

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

Square was always of the mind that it would be best to commit 100 percent to just one thing, so where, for example, Sega would buy a $10,000 machine, Square would buy a $100,000 machine. Then when we’d go out to recruit designers and programmers, they would say, “Well, we’d rather work with the $100,000 machine.”

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

It was a very developer-friendly environment. … We were only able to do what we were doing because the company was financially healthy.

Yoshitaka Amano

Image illustrator, freelance

I felt the budget getting bigger and the scale getting bigger. It didn’t feel like a domestic thing anymore; it felt like something that was going worldwide and becoming more global and more important. But I didn’t really get paid more.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

There was a great push to get our dev environment up to speed so that we could effectively develop at full speed. All the game designers had an SGI on their desk. They had a PC on their desk. [Square] spent a lot of money on infrastructure. And I know Hashimoto-san probably had a large purse to work with, just to try to get the best 3D artists.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

At that time, every workstation cost $70,000 U.S. At first, when we were working on the Siggraph demo, we ordered four machines. We were a small customer. After we moved on to Final Fantasy 7, we asked them for a quote for 200 machines. They were surprised. “What?!”

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

We used about $40 million [approximately $61 million in 2017, accounting for inflation] for the game’s development. We probably spent $10 million of that just on the computer graphics.

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

At that time, I was the head of system administration, so I arranged and bought all of the equipment. [Over the course of two years] I signed checks to Silicon Graphics totaling about $38 million. I bought more than 200 Indigo2 desktop machines, Onyx and Challenge rendering servers and other machines. …

During Final Fantasy 7’s development, we purchased 200 to 250 Indigo2s at $70,000 apiece. An Onyx server cost about $1,000,000. A Challenge server cost about $500,000. So we paid a total of around $17,000,000 on SGI equipment. … And also for software, we paid Alias approximately 2,000,000 yen multiplied by 250 for a total of around $4 million. So excluding labor costs, we spent around $21,000,000 on graphics hardware and software. About 90 percent of that was for Final Fantasy 7, but we may have used it on other projects as well. …

One thing that surprises me even now is, at the time, the PlayStation development kits were about $20,000 each, and they were just sitting there in cardboard boxes in the hallway where pretty much anybody could enter off the street and grab them. And there were SGI machines sitting there too, and literally anyone could have just walked in from outside and taken one. There was pretty much no security.

Recruit magazine

For Final Fantasy 7 on PlayStation, Square poured its resources in — hiring programmers through magazines (though not directly via the sample above, which came years later) and developing its approach to art, music and other aspects behind the scenes. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Square moves quickly to make the game

In early 1996, the FF7 team had much of the equipment and workforce it needed, and just under a year to finish the game. With a short development cycle, Square ensured its visuals would be at the cutting edge of early 3D games. It also meant the staff had to move quickly.

From setting up a tools pipeline to learning the hardware to the ground level programming, the team learned as it went.

Hiroki Chiba

Event planner, Square Japan

Because it was the first 3D game in the series, everything was new and everything was a challenge.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

It was kind of a jolting experience to go from 2D to 3D. When I was back in school, I didn’t really put much effort into technical studies and that sort of thing, and I just kind of thought about making games one way … And then once I made the jump to 3D graphics, I realized I didn’t know nearly as much math as I should. And I was really upset at myself for not studying more math in school. … I think a lot of programmers at the time were probably in the same position.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

Most of the difficulty was the in-game stuff and the tiny memory space. The Siggraph tech demo used a very high-end SGI super workstation. It had 256 megabytes of memory and also 256 megabytes of texture memory. In ‘96, it was a big machine. Do you know how much memory was available on the PlayStation 1? Two megabytes. Only 2 megabytes available for the system memory and also 500K for the texture memory. It was so tiny. And the problem was the motion data. The animation data was just so huge, and we needed to think about how to shrink it.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

We had to be efficient in figuring out what character 3D animation data you wanted in a particular level, so that you wouldn’t be spending too much time loading stuff. I remember being given this assignment where the metric that I had to meet was that all the Final Fantasy 7 characters for the field maps — the main characters, the party characters — had to be able to be animating at 60 frames per second lined up side by side on a screen. … I did manage to achieve that with some of the optimizations that Sony reluctantly made available to us. Their original dev tools were designed in a way where — they were hoping to make it so they could have devs work with the support of a [PlayStation] API so that wouldn’t break as they made improvements under the hood. But it got to a point where we really needed to get more of the hardware out. And one of our devs actually disassembled their code and figured out what the hardware code instructions were to do certain calculations optimally. …

At first, Sony wasn’t too keen on us accessing the hardware directly because it would require any future hardware changes to maintain the functionality we were dependent on. Fortunately, they eventually relented and, in turn, cleaned up our internal API so that it could be made available to all PlayStation developers.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

I remember seeing the lead programmer, Narita-san, struggling to make the characters walk on a 3D surface. When he solved the problem, everybody was so happy with it. … Never forget. Unforgettable event.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

The biggest moment that I remember was — and it may have been a first for Final Fantasy 7 — where they were syncing real-time 3D with FMVs. Do you remember the opening scene where you were zooming into the train, and then you had Cloud jumping off the train, and you had, I think, two guards standing on the train platform, who would be coming into view, being rendered in real time? I remember everything was supposed to work in theory, with all the math that we had done at that point. But as you may have heard, PlayStation — in order to get its performance — didn’t have the precision of your high-end SGI machines. So you had to sort of fudge certain numerical values to approximate what it was doing on the SGI. And that moment in the initial scene where the camera just zoomed in — it wasn’t a full-blown FMV at that point; it was a really simply rendered 3D background — but just to see the 3D characters and the FMV in sync was really awesome at that point.

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

[The game] was just so beautiful. It was just so ahead of its time. … There just was nothing like that kind of melding of 2D and 3D art, and having the art transition from in game to CGI back into in game. To me, that was just awesome. It didn’t take you out of the experience when you were playing the game. I think that was the beauty of Final Fantasy 7. … You’re always immersed.

Motonori Sakakibara

Movie director, Square

Every day, we’d see some progression and be amazed by the result. The project lasted just one year, but the energy level was very high. I’d never seen that kind of team before.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

One of the biggest factors was that everyone was highly motivated. There were a lot of people who were working on the game 24 hours a day, and no one got burned out because we were all motivated and having a good time. So while Square put a lot of money into technology and manpower, motivation was definitely also a big factor. We were young and could work long periods of time straight through. …

I spent most of my waking hours thinking about the game. I would get up in the morning and immediately start thinking about the game, go straight to work, work on the game until late at night with everyone else at Square, and then at night I’d get on the train and go home thinking about the game, get in the bathtub thinking about the game, go to sleep, and do the same thing the next day. I didn’t feel like I had to work to get things done. I wanted to do it.

It was just so ahead of its time. … There just was nothing like that kind of melding of 2D and 3D art, and having the art transition from in game to CGI back into in game.Frank Hom
The National Art Center in Tokyo put on an exhibit featuring Cloud's sword

For two months in mid-2015, The National Art Center in Tokyo put on a “Manga, Anime, Games from Japan” exhibit featuring Cloud’s sword from Final Fantasy 7 and wireframe art of the tech behind the game. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Artist Tetsuya Nomura moves up the ranks

While Square sorted its tech under the hood, it also needed to decide what art style Final Fantasy 7, as the company’s first big 3D project, should have.

The game’s overall appearance fell to art director Yusuke Naora. But it was character designer Tetsuya Nomura who became a breakout star amongst fans thanks to his characters like Cloud, whose spiky hair translated well to the screen in the game’s 3D engine. Across the board, FF7’s characters moved away from the super-deformed look established in the 2D Final Fantasy games, which many say made them more palatable for Western fans at the time.

Over the course of the game’s development, Nomura not only drew the cast but took some ownership of the creative side of the project as a whole, contributing to the game’s story and overall design alongside Sakaguchi and Kitase.

In the years following FF7’s release, Nomura would go on to spearhead the Kingdom Hearts franchise and become one of Square’s highest profile employees.

Nobuo Uematsu

Music composer, Square Japan

Nomura-san had been working on the series for a long time [before Final Fantasy 7], but I feel like his art really came to life in the PlayStation era because you could show more on the screen. I think it worked out really well for him that the Final Fantasy series moved onto PlayStation.

Motonori Sakakibara

Movie director, Square

Nomura-san was a great 2D artist, but his characters worked especially well in 3D. He spent a ton of time making the game characters look like his original designs, which was one of the big secrets behind the creation of the Final Fantasy 7 characters.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I’d been involved with the series since Final Fantasy 5. And on Final Fantasy 5 and 6, I would always talk about plans and mention ideas to Kitase-san. But on 7, that was when I took a bit more of a leadership role and started coming up with proposals and speaking more clearly about what I wanted to do in the game.

Motonori Sakakibara

Movie director, Square

Nomura-san is crazy. [Laughs] His standards were extremely high. He was always concerned about the characters’ eyes, for example — the shapes and sizes of the eyes, the thicknesses of the eyelids. He’d spend a ton of time just on a little curve of an eye. I don’t think he ever gave me a simple approval.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I’m a little bit fickle, so I’m not the type of person to work on one thing and focus simply on that. Say, if I’m drawing — I wouldn’t work on one single piece at a time. It would be more like four or five and I’d rotate between them. Or if I’m working on a design document for a game and I feel I need a change of pace, I’ll start drawing something instead. Or if I need to draw, I might work on different projects to change my mood and get that sort of refresh. So that’s how I prioritize those kinds of things. But if there is a deadline, of course I’ll prioritize that first.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I might sound a little condescending here, but he seemed like a very dedicated artist back during Final Fantasy 7. I don’t know what about 7 itself, or perhaps it was actually Final Fantasy 8 that changed the tide, but he seemed to become a very different person at that point, where the authority that he gained from Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 got to a point where he became sort of untouchable in a similar vein as Sakaguchi-san. You couldn’t really fight against him.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Between when I started at Square and now, my position within the company has changed a lot. So when I started, I was kind of at the bottom rung of the corporate chain, and now I’m at a level where I’m making executive decisions. So on that level, it’s changed, but my stance has always been to look at things from the player’s perspective. Some people might disagree with me, but I see my role as looking after the player’s perspective. And in that respect, I feel like I haven’t changed much.

Tetsuya Nomura

One of Square’s longest-running character designers, Tetsuya Nomura started with the Final Fantasy series as a tester on FF4 and has been contributing to the series in various forms ever since. He’s also branched out into many of Square’s other games, most notably overseeing the creation and development of the action role-playing Kingdom Hearts franchise. In 2014, after years working as the director of Final Fantasy 15, Nomura stepped out of that role without Square giving a clear public reason why. Since that announcement, he’s been continuing to direct Kingdom Hearts 3, directing the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and working on various other art and design projects. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Cloud and Sephiroth

Square’s Tetsuya Nomura contributed to many aspects of Final Fantasy 7’s development, but fans know him best as the game’s character designer. He was responsible for the game’s cast, including main character Cloud (left) and villain Sephiroth (right). | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Artist Yoshitaka Amano shares the spotlight

Starting with the original Final Fantasy games in the ’80s, one of the franchise’s most distinctive elements has been its promotional and concept artwork from freelance illustrator Yoshitaka Amano, whose pieces for games and otherwise have made him a celebrity in art circles.

Often appearing on box art and in marketing materials for Final Fantasy games, Amano’s work takes the characters from each game and presents them with a fantastical style players don’t typically see in the game industry.

“I feel like what I add to the franchise is my approach differs from a game developer’s approach,” he says. “And I think that gives the art more leeway — it isn’t limited to something that would fit into a game.”

While for early Final Fantasy games, Amano based his work on pixel art designs and thus had to visualize what those characters should look like in his paintings, on Final Fantasy 7 he painted a series of pieces inspired by concept art from Square character designer Tetsuya Nomura. Square couriered over Nomura’s samples, and Amano interpreted them as he saw fit.

“Amano was way above our pay grade,” says Nomura, who says he likely only met with him once during FF7’s development. “He wasn’t someone we could just talk to casually.”

Because Amano used Nomura’s work as a jumping off point, he didn’t have to read between the lines as much to define what the characters should look like before painting them in his style. He says it was a straightforward process and he didn’t have any particular advice for Nomura.

“There wasn’t really much that I passed along to Nomura-san,” Amano says, “but I was relieved because I didn’t have to do as much.” [Laughs]

Talk to Amano about his work, and he focuses less on the details of each game and more on how the characters make him feel. He can’t always describe which characters do what at which point in each game; instead, he looks at the game industry from a high-concept perspective, noting that he sees video games as a great way to deliver new technology to the masses.

Amano’s art has made him an integral part of the franchise — even through to today, as he still contributes occasional work for Square’s new Final Fantasy projects, such as a mural for Final Fantasy 15 (which Square then turned into a trailer).

Now in his 60s, Amano says he’s less inclined to take on client jobs that come with rigid guidelines, as he doesn’t like the limitations that come with that sort of work. But he regularly shows his work at galleries and says he has no intentions of retiring any time soon.

“As an artist, I still feel like a beginner,” he says. “So there’s a lot left to do. I’m going to continue doing this for a long, long time.”

Yoshitaka Amano

Perhaps the most famous Final Fantasy team member to never work at Square, Yoshitaka Amano started his career in the ’60s as an illustrator working on anime like Speed Racer, but went freelance in the ’80s and has worked for himself ever since. He’s been involved with the Final Fantasy series from the beginning, handling much of the early promotional artwork, though he prefers to keep a professional distance from what’s happening inside Square. Today, Amano is one of the most popular artists in Japan, at times selling new mainstream work for six figures while still dabbling in occasional Final Fantasy art and other game industry jobs. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Composer Nobuo Uematsu tries a new approach

From Final Fantasy’s earliest days, Nobuo Uematsu made a name for himself as the series’ composer. On Famicom and Super Famicom, that meant extracting distinctive melodies from primitive audio hardware. On PlayStation, all of a sudden, he faced fewer limitations. He could create larger files and use more sounds simultaneously.

“That was the kind of detailed work I did with the programmers, although nobody really seemed to notice that effort,” Uematsu says.

For FF7, he says he tried to approach the music like a film soundtrack, worrying less about making a single melody to define the game and more about composing songs that wouldn’t overwhelm the game’s 3D visuals. “I tried to make tracks where the melody wouldn’t stick out as much,” he says.

As Uematsu tells it, though, composing songs for Final Fantasy 7 posed a unique challenge due to the nature of CDs.

Nobuo Uematsu

Music composer, Square Japan

While I was working on Final Fantasy 5, there were already rumors about the next-generation hardware, but I didn’t know what to expect. I’d heard rumors that games were going to be on CD-ROMs, so the first thing that came to my mind was, “Oh great, now I can hire singers and create tracks with vocals on them.” But I tried it out [for Final Fantasy 7] and even though I had enough space to include vocals, they made it so the game took longer to load between scenes. And I didn’t want to do that just for the music, with the game starting and stopping as you play. I didn’t think that made sense. So I gave up on that idea and made it work so all the sound would load when you first booted up the game. I was particularly invested in that idea.

Because we did that, though, the sound quality wasn’t as high as it could have been. And when the game shipped, I compared the sound quality of Final Fantasy 7 with another game released around that same time and the quality for the other title was pretty high. The game was stopping to load sound data here and there, which I didn’t want to do. But after comparing our sound quality with theirs, I thought, “OK, maybe I should loosen up a little bit and go for higher quality sound even if it hurts the gameplay flow a little bit.” For Final Fantasy 8, we did that. …

I don’t remember the specific title I was jealous of, but it was from the Suikoden series — whichever title that was out at that time. It loads a lot, and I was thinking that it stopped the game too often, but the quality was really high. That was kind of the trigger to make me think in a different way.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

With CDs, the load times were a pain to deal with — not just for the music, but for all aspects of the game. We had to figure out what we could do to cut down on the load times as much as possible. We actually put a lot of effort into making sure the game was constantly preloading whatever players would see next. … We had to kind of cut corners for stuff like that everywhere.

Nobuo Uematsu

One of Square’s first employees, Nobuo Uematsu made a name for himself as the composer of the early Final Fantasy games and stuck with the franchise for more than 20 years, contributing less as time went on. Final Fantasy 7 marked his first game on PlayStation, which gave him more space to work with, though he hesitated to use it all since he didn’t want to add to the game’s load times. In 2004, Uematsu left Square to go freelance and has rejoined Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi on many of Mistwalker’s key titles, in addition to working on independent albums and contributing to games like Japanese mobile RPG megahit Granblue Fantasy. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Sheet music for One-Winged Angel

Former Square composer Nobuo Uematsu still plays Final Fantasy songs live at concerts in 2017, including fan favorite “One-Winged Angel.” | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo; Materials credit: Ichigo’s Sheet Music

[Note: While working on Final Fantasy 7, Uematsu composed a song called “One-Winged Angel” using an experimental approach. It went on to become one of his most popular songs, but he says his goal when he was writing it was simply to get out of his comfort zone.]

Nobuo Uematsu

Music composer, Square Japan

With Final Fantasy 6, I had put a lot of effort into creating the boss tracks. And since I put a lot of effort in, they turned out really well and gained a nice reputation. After that, I was thinking, “OK, the normal approach won’t exceed what I did for Final Fantasy 6.” So a normal tune or classic track wouldn’t accomplish much. And I had pulled out “The Rite of Spring” by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and normally just listening to a track doesn’t help me. But I just sat there and kept listening to that track and started thinking I wanted to make a wild, classic tune.

So after that, I started — I would go into the office and just record a couple phrases that came into my mind. Like in the morning, I would come into the office and record the phrase that pops into my mind. And I just kept doing that for two weeks. And after two weeks, I had a lot of random phrases piled up. Then I took those as puzzle pieces and tried to line them up in an interesting order to make sense as a track. That was a totally new approach for me. … This was the only time I ever used that approach. It was almost like a gamble — it could have turned out great, or it could have turned out horribly. …

That was a really fun time for me since the number of sounds I could use expanded a lot. … That might have been a shift in my career, since I wasn’t limited as much anymore.

Alexander O. Smith

Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002)

I feel like, more than the changes [Uematsu made in his approach to FF7’s music] — and there were certainly changes — I like the consistency of it. I mean, Uematsu-san’s songs sound like Uematsu-san songs, and that’s comforting. People want that, especially if it’s Final Fantasy. It’s a real note for the series.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

I was a really big fan of Uematsu-san’s music. While I was working on the game, Uematsu-san was working on the composition, and he’d send over new tracks as they came along. I actually created a little music player program on my machine just to listen to the tracks he sent over.

Yoshitaka Amano

Image illustrator, freelance

I have high respect for [Uematsu] as a musician. He’s a great composer. When you hear his melodies, you can tell right away that he did them and that they sound like Final Fantasy. He’s even in general music textbooks that you use at school. I think it’s great that a game composer was able to become a mainstream success like that.

Square kills one of the game’s main characters

In early 1997, Square wrapped its work on the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 7. The team had seen through Sakaguchi’s ideas, producing a game with best-in-class visuals and mountains of content, helping promote PlayStation as a console.

Yet the team had a secret. A spoiler. Toward the end of the game’s first disc, villain Sephiroth stabs one of the main characters, Aerith Gainsborough, through the back, killing her.

Looking back now, many point out that the scene appears almost comically primitive, with blocky characters and limited animation. But at the time, it stood out as one of the most emotionally charged moments the game industry had produced — a moment that stuck with fans for years. It even made some players cry.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Did you know people have been coming up to me for years now and saying, “You killed Aerith!?”

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

[To Nomura:] Are you trying to blame me for that? [Laughs]

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

OK, so maybe I did kill Aerith. But if I hadn’t stopped you, in the second half of the game, you were planning to kill everyone off but the final three characters the player chooses!

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

No way! I wrote that? Where?

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

In the scene where they parachute into Midgar. You wanted everyone to die there!

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Really? Wait, I’m starting to remember …

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Yeah, remember? You and [writer] Nojima-san were all excited about this. I was the one who said “No way!” and stopped you guys. You wanted to kill everyone except the final three characters the player chose for the endgame.

Kazushige Nojima

Scenario writer, Square Japan

Obviously, I’m a scenario writer so I wrote the script where Aerith dies. But for that decision, we talked it through with the main staff. We talked a lot about how the story would turn out.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

The theme of Final Fantasy 7 was “life,” and we sacrificed Aerith in order to give weight and depth to that theme. Her death is a tragedy, but if we suddenly just killed off everyone else after that, it would dilute the meaning of her death.

Kazushige Nojima

Scenario writer, Square Japan

Back then it was so much easier to change the scenario on the fly. So every day, we’d go back and forth about how to approach things.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Long after we made the decision to kill Aerith and the development had progressed considerably, I used to go visit Uematsu-san in his room. Just to hang out and talk about random things. One day, toward the end of development, I visited him to ask him, “Do you think we did the right thing in killing Aerith?”

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Really?

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

He said, sure, he thought so.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Hah, so casual!

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I was relieved to hear it.

Nobuo Uematsu

Music composer, Square Japan

When I was playing the game, I was really surprised when she died so early on. Everybody probably thought she was going to be one of the main popular characters, but then she just died right away. Maybe that’s the reason why everyone remembers it so much.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

When a character in a video game dies, no one thinks it’s that sad. They’re just characters in a game, after all — you can just reset the game and try again, or you can always revive them somehow. I felt that their lives just didn’t have much weight. With “life” as our theme for FF7, I thought we should try depicting a character who really dies for good, who can’t come back. For that death to resonate, it needed to be an important character. So we thought killing off the heroine would allow players to think more deeply about that theme.

Nobuo Uematsu

Music composer, Square Japan

When I was composing [the music that played when Aerith died], I didn’t really think about her death, but I felt like she wasn’t a very happy character. She was really innocent and pure but had a tragic kind of life. … I did realize it was probably going to be an important track. …

If I knew that scene would make people cry, I might have made something totally different — something designed to make you cry. But I went with a kind of sad but beautiful tune, and since it’s not the kind of track you typically hear when something tragic happens, maybe that worked out well. When something is missing, people tend to use their imaginations. So since the track doesn’t express 100 percent of the feeling in that moment, people might have filled in the gaps in their heads. Maybe.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

[It wasn’t my goal to make people cry with that scene.] It was more wanting people to understand what it means to hurt and to feel that sense of loss.

Kazushige Nojima

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Kazushige Nojima wrote the stories for many of Square’s biggest games, Final Fantasy 7 among them. Yet growing up, he says he was a bigger fan of Enix’s Dragon Quest than he was of Final Fantasy, considering Dragon Quest 2 and 3 to be “the quintessential Japanese RPGs.” That doesn’t mean he would want to try his hand at the Dragon Quest series, though. “I couldn’t do it,” he says. “I just regard it so highly. I met Yuji Horii, who created Dragon Quest, when Square and Enix merged and I was just so tense. I couldn’t say anything. It was a profound experience.” Nojima left Square in 2003 to go freelance, though he still regularly works with Square Enix. In 2017, he’s writing the story for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Aerith

Almost 20 years after Final Fantasy 7’s release, Square Enix still requests that media outlets not use certain imagery of Aerith’s death scene in articles for fear of spoiling the surprise. We weren’t planning to anyway, but if you want to see it you can here. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Square chases the Western market

Given Final Fantasy’s track record, Square executives in Japan didn’t have much concern over whether FF7 would sell well locally. And it did, racking up more than two million units in its first week there, eventually going on to sell more than four million.

North America and Europe were another story. At the time, Japanese-developed role-playing games had a cult following in the West, and the Final Fantasy series had struggled to expand beyond that small-but-loyal audience.

So as Final Fantasy 7’s Western release approached, Square closed its existing sales and marketing office in Washington and hired two game industry newcomers to start a new office in Costa Mesa, Calif., giving the company and the series a fresh start in the West.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

At the time, more than 95 percent of the revenue for Squaresoft came from the Japanese market. The remainder five percent came from, mostly from the U.S, but maybe one or two percent from the European operation. But the majority of the revenue was from the Japanese market. So they wanted to increase their business outside of Japan. That’s how I was hired.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

I knew [FF7 publicity producer] Shinji Hashimoto at Square from my time at an ad agency in Tokyo, and one day I got a call from him and he said, “Are you interested in moving companies?” So I asked him about it. He said, “We have a big project coming up, Final Fantasy 7, and we want it to sell worldwide.” Then he said he was looking for someone to run marketing for the U.S. market. And I said, “What? U.S. market?” Because I couldn’t speak English well. [Laughs] But he said, “It doesn’t matter. If you’re interested in it, please contact me.”

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

My first assignment at Squaresoft was relocating the Squaresoft operation in Redmond, Washington down to California.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

This was sort of the right timing, because Square had shifted from Nintendo to Sony. Square previously had an office in Seattle because Nintendo was nearby. But Sakaguchi-san decided to close the Seattle office, and everyone working there left.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

Sakaguchi-san was opening [a] development studio [originally known as Square L.A. and later Square USA] in Marina del Rey [to work on other projects], so we opened the publishing office [somewhat nearby] in Costa Mesa.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

Normally San Francisco would have made sense because Sony would have been nearby. But at that time we were in Los Angeles, and we had a small office inside Sony’s U.S. headquarters because Final Fantasy 7 received the first-party treatment. We controlled marketing but asked Sony to do the budget and publishing and those kinds of things.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

In the early ’90s, Yoshihiro Maruyama worked for Japanese management guru Ken Ohmae, who had a variety of contacts in the game industry. And at one point in 1994, Ohmae took Maruyama to meet with former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who in turn introduced both of them to Square’s top executives. A year later, Square hired Maruyama to run the company’s U.S. headquarters. As the head of the Costa Mesa, Calif. office, he oversaw FF7’s Western release and signed deals to release the game on PC in the U.S., Europe and Korea. In 2003, Maruyama took over Microsoft’s Xbox division in Japan. In recent years, he’s worked as an agent, setting up deals such as connecting high-profile Japanese writer/director Yasumi Matsuno with independent studio Playdek for the role-playing game Unsung Story. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

Final Fantasy 6 didn’t sell very well outside of Japan, and so when we were bringing Final Fantasy 7 overseas, I was thinking I needed to change something — we needed to do something different. So I was thinking, “What would make a difference for the game outside of Japan?” …

The Sony brand was well known around the world, so I was thinking it would be great if it came out under that Sony brand. … Japanese RPGs had a small market outside of Japan. People didn’t think of them as high-profile games. And I thought having it come out under the Sony brand would help that perception.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I think it was the third year of the PlayStation. They were still struggling to compete with Sega and Nintendo in the U.S. And compared to Sega and Nintendo, Sony’s first-party portfolio was rather weak. So once we decided to [develop FF7 on PlayStation], Sony really strongly asked for the publishing rights to Square titles in America as well as in Europe.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

Yoshi and I didn’t have a lot of experience. Sony aggressively pitched to Square to bring Final Fantasy over, and at that time Sakaguchi-san and everybody thought we should.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

They were really eager to publish it under their brand. And because they were so eager, they also signed a deal with very good conditions where Square earned almost as much money as if we had published it ourselves.

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

For the States, it was a six-title deal. So the first six titles that came out with the Squaresoft label, or logo, they were all published by SCEA and also SCEE.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

Sony also agreed to co-promote and market the game around the world. They put in a lot of money, as did Square, and it turned out to be a huge marketing campaign.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

Sony’s philosophy was they didn’t want to market the hardware; all the marketing budget should be for the titles. So once we gave the publishing rights to Final Fantasy and others to Sony, Sony spent lots of money promoting the Final Fantasy franchise in America. I think it was a good thing, because they spent so much on promotion — on TV and print and all those kinds of stuff. … I think maybe tens of millions. … That was a huge amount at the time.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

Just in the North American market, we probably spent more than $20 million on marketing. … Including Europe, probably $30 million. … Including Japan, probably $40 million.

Jun Iwasaki

As the head of Western marketing for Final Fantasy 7, Jun Iwasaki worked closely with Sony and ad agencies to promote the game to an audience unfamiliar with role-playing games. Following FF7’s release, he took over as president of Square’s U.S. office, then left in 2004 over a disagreement with then-president and CEO of Square Enix, Yoichi Wada. Iwasaki says his main regret upon leaving was that he wasn’t able to see through a marketing campaign for Dragon Quest 7 in the West; he had developed a plan to pit Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest fans against each other, since the games took different approaches to the role-playing genre and were under the same roof after Square merged with Enix. After leaving Square, Iwasaki started XSEED, a small publisher that releases Japanese games in the West. And in 2012, he took over GungHo Online Entertainment America, the U.S. branch of the company behind Japanese mobile sensation Puzzle & Dragons. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Final Fantasy 7 becomes an international hit

Despite pumping tens of millions of dollars into Final Fantasy 7’s marketing, some at Square weren’t convinced the game would be able to reach a wide audience in the U.S. and Europe, given the limited reach of previous Final Fantasy games. A Japanese RPG had never broken through in the West, and some thought one never would, given the slower pacing compared to popular Western action games.

Iwasaki, Maruyama and the team in Square’s new U.S. sales and marketing office took this as a challenge.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

After I joined Square, Sakaguchi-san mentioned, “Your mission is to sell a million copies of Final Fantasy 7” in the U.S. Because at that time, Sony hadn’t reached a million for any title. A million was sort of the magic number.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

When Final Fantasy was on Nintendo platforms, the series wasn’t very popular outside of Japan. Final Fantasy 6 only sold about 400,000 copies in America. …

[For Final Fantasy 7] I was very confident that we could sell 2.5 to 3 million in Japan, so that made me comfortable enough that the game didn’t seem like a huge risk. But I was also thinking about what it might sell around the world, and I felt some risk there. As time went on, I was able to sign the deal with Sony to put it out under the Sony brand in the U.S., and because of that I was thinking, “Oh, maybe we’ll be able to sell a million outside of Japan.”

Seth Luisi

Associate producer, Sony Computer Entertainment America

Really, a lot of it was about, “How can we help bring Japanese RPGs to North America and really show it as a really big triple-A seller?” Because at the time, having working on Japanese RPGs before, people saw it as a very niche market in North America. They didn’t see anything as being able to sell more than 30,000 or 50,000 units. So [with] Final Fantasy, our big goal with that one was really to change that. To really promote it as a big title, get the right advertising behind it and getting the really good push behind it so that it had all the attention it deserved and was able to be well received in the North American market.

David Bamberger

Senior product manager, Sony Computer Entertainment America

Our mantra was, “Don’t drop the baby.”

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

The internal office rumors were that if we didn’t succeed with FF7, that they were going to shut down operations. So in a way, it’s like, “OK, our jobs are on the line,” even though we had this six-title publishing deal. [Laughs] …

I think the biggest challenge was it visually spoke wonders, but if you were not familiar with the Final Fantasy series at all up until that point, and then it came with the number seven, it was kind of like, “How do we [explain that]?” … [It was] visually stunning, the best game that you have to ever own, etc. All these quotes are out there. But it was more of what’s really on the inside. Like, “How do we communicate that?”

Starting her career in Honda’s legal department, Kyoko Higo soon joined Square’s U.S. office as a marketing assistant and, on the side, also served as its quality assurance translator. On Final Fantasy 7, that meant pulling a nightly after-hours shift to organize and translate bugs found in the California office and send them back to the development team in Tokyo. In 2004, she left Square and joined startup publisher XSEED alongside a handful of former Square co-workers. Then in 2006, she went freelance, working as a consultant, interpreter and business development manager with many of the biggest game companies in Japan. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

We asked Sony not to mention the word “RPG” because people thought role-playing games were too long and repetitive and had a lot of waiting around. From a marketing perspective, we saw that as a bad word.

Chris Ansell

Project manager, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Even the whole turn-based nature of the game was, for most European console PlayStation 1 gamers, like, “What is this? Why is it so slow?” So we constantly were telling people, “Look, it starts to feel really fast and just as stressful as a real-time combat game, but you have to get into it. You have to give it a chance to breathe and to teach you the system.”

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

For a game at that time, released during that holiday period, I think a lot of people would agree that it was one of the most beautifully made and presented games. And so, having still images printed in magazines would not have been enough to kind of show how attractive and how appealing it is. I think it was almost a no brainer that we had to look into a TV solution. And Sony was already on board [with doing commercials].

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

Sony did some PR and other things. But from a creative point of view, we held the rights to approve things. So I would always send things to Sakaguchi-san to check, because these characters were like his kids. [Sony vice president of marketing] Andrew House always complained about that. [Laughs]

David Bamberger

Senior product manager, Sony Computer Entertainment America

We had a three month window. So in packaged goods, if you can release in September, you can get a second reorder for December, and then by Q1 that’s kind of the show. The parade has passed.

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

We were getting, I think, weekly updates on preorders at that time. … And the numbers kept on going up. And then the ads started to hit and everything was sort of coming together. I’d go into a store, not doing store checks, and see the [marketing on display], the big Cloud standee at the local Electronics Boutique. And a lot of our QA testers … were also [UC Irvine] students. Because UCI was a 10-15 minute drive from our office. And I remember going into our kitchen or lunchroom, and they were talking about how their friends at school were getting super excited and starting to talk about the game. So there were those small moments.

I think the big moment came when it was released and all these cover stories were out. I don’t remember how many covers we secured, but I’m sure it was — I remember PSM, EGM. Most of the magazines wanted covers. So we were starting to see them framed in our office. And then, when week one sales, week two sales, we started seeing numbers. We were hearing … that this title was on track to become the fastest title to reach a million units in that year. Which we did. We hit it in just under three months.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

I remember Andrew House called me and said, “Oh, we shipped a million.‘“And I called Takechi-san first. And I said, “We got it to a million!” And he said, “Oh, that’s good.’” [Laughs]

David Bamberger

Senior product manager, Sony Computer Entertainment America

I had a $20 bet with [Sony vice president Phil Harrison that the game] was going to sell through a million by March. And I lost the bet.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

When we found out that we reached a million [in the U.S.], we all went to Roppongi [a district of Tokyo known for its nightlife] and partied. We were really happy with how the sales were growing and growing outside of Japan. Basically, we went with Sony because we wanted to create titles with a lot of CG in them and make games that were different from what was already out there, and that’s why we made a big investment in Final Fantasy. And because of the success of Final Fantasy 7, we were able to put out more and more titles after.

David Bamberger

Spending his career in marketing, David Bamberger has worked with many of the largest companies in the game industry — from Electronic Arts to Ubisoft to Eidos. While at Sony, he worked on the rollout plans for Final Fantasy 7’s North American release, coordinating with Square’s U.S. office on packaging, advertising and merchandise. In 2009, he joined Sega, working out of its San Francisco office. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Roppongi

Following the news of Final Fantasy 7 selling a million copies in the West, a group from Square Japan went to a bar in Tokyo’s Roppongi district to celebrate. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

So it came out on September 7th, ‘97, and then I remember the first week of December I walked into the office one morning and [Iwasaki and Maruyama] wanted to gather everyone and announce that we had just hit the one-million unit mark, and that Andy House had just sent us a few bottles of champagne, I believe. [Laughs] And [Iwasaki], because he got the news before he left the house, or as he was coming into the office, he bought a few more bottles, and that day was like the happiest day at the office. After working so hard, long hours, a couple overnighters even — not just a couple, but many, overnighters for even someone like myself who was on the marketing side. … That was, I think, our proudest and happiest day that came right before the holidays.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

Then Kyoko [Higo] and the team gave me a plaque. I was crying at that time, so I remember that. [Laughs]

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

I can never speak on behalf of the development team, but I think it was a huge boost of confidence, in terms of not just accomplishing something, creating this massive game with tons of people, but also to sort of crack that overseas market and being able to have [what we now call] a Western audience or Western fans.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

It ended up selling three million in North America and two million in Europe, so it worked out really well. It basically became a worldwide series.

Final Fantasy 7 stirs up controversy

While most aspects of Final Fantasy 7’s Western release proved successful, the game didn’t come and go without a dose of controversy — one surrounding its portrayal of black and gay characters.

In 1997, players didn’t have the same social media loudspeaker to complain that they do in 2017, but some fans still expressed their distaste for how one of the game’s primary characters, Barret, plays into black stereotypes and how the game’s main character, Cloud, visits a bath house filled with men acting out gay stereotypes.

Some of the complaints focused on the game’s content — such as Barret’s character design, which presents him as a hulking, tough angry black man — while others focused on its English localization.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

Well, there was the Barret stuff. … There was the controversy around Barret’s language, that he was speaking Ebonics.

Alexander O. Smith

Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002)

I probably wasn’t as aware of those issues then as I hope I am now. So it didn’t — I mean, I thought, “Why is this Mr. T?” … That did strike me. I remember that.

Kazushige Nojima

Scenario writer, Square Japan

I don’t want to talk about this in too much detail, but personally maybe I didn’t put enough thought into [the black and gay sterotypes], into how they would be received. I kind of learned from the reaction I got. Especially with the racial discrimination, I wasn’t very aware of what I was depicting in the scenario, and it wasn’t until someone told me about the criticism that I became fully aware of what I was putting into the story.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I did hear complaints about Barret. I later asked why. … I think it had to do with the localization and translation not being very good. Ever since that experience, we’ve paid a lot more attention to localization. Back then, we weren’t very strict about controlling it. We just let the translators do what they thought was best. But it led to them adding and portraying things that we never intended in our original script. So since then, we’ve worked with the translation team to make sure the localization is as close as possible to the original.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

Before then, the development teams in Japan [didn’t] care about localization, but after Final Fantasy 7, a lot of the teams asked about cultural and localization issues.

Alex O. Smith

As a grad student in the late ’90s, Alexander O. Smith played Final Fantasy 7 and saw an opportunity to put his own spin on the series’ English text. So he pursued a job in localization and joined Square’s team as it was wrapping up Final Fantasy 8. Smith had a history in localization, having subtitled soap operas for a Japanese television station in Hawaii, and went on to become one of Square’s most popular English writers. In 2002, he left Square to start a small translation company called Kajiya Productions, and has continued to work on many of Square and Square Enix’s games. In June 2016, he announced that Kajiya Productions is working on Square Enix’s remastered version of Final Fantasy 12. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

[Note: Apart from the game’s controversial elements, FF7’s localization featured a number of lines that fans found humorous — such as, “This guy are sick,” which has since become infamous online. Team members credit these hiccups to limited localization resources, noting that a single staff member working in Square’s U.S. office wrote most of the game’s English text.]

Chris Ansell

Project manager, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Translations are like that — you’re always gonna have language purists who are like, “It could be so much better.” And it turns out, well, specific phrases could have been better. But to hear them speak, it’s like the whole thing, it should be like a children’s book or something in its translation quality. [Laughs] So I do recall there was definitely some feedback about, “It could be so much better in this language,” or “They missed the idea of this because I can speak Japanese and you didn’t get across that concept.” So there was certainly an element of that, but I do think a lot of it is tough to avoid.

Alexander O. Smith

Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002)

I mean, obviously there’s really, really bad translation out there, and FF7 is not that at all. What I saw was there seemed to be a lack of flow between some of the lines. Occasionally things would throw me for a loop. They still kind of throw me for a loop. Now I understand why the choices were made better. … I heard [product development coordinator Michael Baskett] only had like a couple months to do it.

Kyoko Higo

Assistant marketing associate, Square U.S.

[It] was a tiny localization department. … But without their work, a lot of what we ended up playing would not have happened.

Alexander O. Smith

Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002)

[When working on Final Fantasy 8,] the thing that I heard most in terms of reaction was, “We’re going to spend a lot more time on this translation than they spent on 7.” Because they weren’t given time on 7. …

That’s really the story of Square in those days. It’s changed a lot now. … There was so little communication between dev and localization. Localization didn’t even exist as a department back then. We were actually officially subsumed to this — oh my God, what was it? It was like an IT division or something ridiculous. It had nothing to do with localization at all, except that one of the programmers from IT was the guy that they roped into handling the single-byte character conversions and stuff like that. … You know, they were using GameSharks to hack FF8 so they could get to text because nobody would give them files. Because, “Oh, you need files to do translation?” That was news to the dev team at that point. So that sort of complete lack of communication was emblematic of those days.

Cloud and Barret

Two of Final Fantasy 7’s main characters, Cloud (left) and Barret (right), each ran into a bit of controversy after the game’s release. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Final Fantasy 7: The aftermath

In the period following Final Fantasy 7’s initial release, Square shuffled many of its resources. Parts of the company continued on to the direct follow-up, Final Fantasy 8. Others continued to develop the rest of Square’s numerous titles. Others teamed up with Western publisher Electronic Arts to form a new distribution partnership. Still others went off to start a new studio in Hawaii, which caused problems for the company as time went on.

It was a time of change for the company riding high on FF7’s success around the globe.

Square ports Final Fantasy 7 to PC

One smaller project to appear in the aftermath was a Final Fantasy 7 PC port.

Even before the PlayStation game’s release, a small group in Square’s Costa Mesa office began looking into the possibility of putting the game on PC. Square wanted to reach players in the U.S. and Europe who didn’t own PlayStations, and its publishing deal with Sony didn’t prevent it from pursuing a PC version elsewhere. After some back and forth, Square struck a deal with Tomb Raider publisher Eidos.

Many at Square saw this as an experiment, figuring the company might be able to squeeze extra sales out of the game it had put so much money behind. An experiment that began with a phone call between Square U.S. head Yoshihiro Maruyama and Eidos president Keith Boesky.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

I got a call two weeks before E3 from Yoshi. I’d never met him before. … I got a call from Yoshi just saying, “Hi, this is Yoshi Maruyama, and I’d like to set a meeting at E3 because we’d like to talk about publishing Final Fantasy 7.” And I’m sitting in my office, and I just — I looked at the phone. I said, ”Final Fantasy 7 — are you serious?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “OK, I’ll be there tomorrow.” And I got on a plane and flew from San Francisco to Orange County to meet with him, because we didn’t know what it was going to be, but there had been a ton of press.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

[A lot of publishers in America and Europe didn’t realize what we had with Final Fantasy 7.] Another publisher referred me to somebody who was covering their Asian operations. I won’t name the company, but … [Laughs]

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

I was just, “OK, I’m there.” EA wouldn’t take the meeting. … Pretty much nobody else. There were a couple other people who took meetings at E3, but I was the only one who went down. I met him in Orange County. I don’t even think he showed me anything. And we talked about it. We told him we were interested. He came by. He met some more people at E3. E3 was in Atlanta that year. Met more people at E3. And then he went for six months and visited all of the Eidos offices, which is more than I did as president. But he went to Hamburg. He went to France. He went to all the offices to look at Eidos’ operation.

Elaine Di lorio

Manager of business development, Square U.S.

My understanding was it was kind of an experiment. [Square] had never done a PC port and they thought that they would set up a team in the U.S. to do the PC port. … So we made the rounds [to find a publisher].

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

Eidos was a very exciting company at the time because Tomb Raider was becoming a big franchise. And they did tremendous marketing.

Elaine Di Lorio

In 1996, Elaine Di lorio joined Square’s Costa Mesa office as employee number 13, working for executive vice president Yoshihiro Maruyama. Over the course of four years there, she handled many of the company’s business relationships with Sony Computer Entertainment America and Europe, as well as strategy guide publisher BradyGames. She also played a role in setting up Square’s deal with Eidos to port, market and distribute Final Fantasy 7 on PC, and stuck around for a couple of years after the port’s release to work on a variety of games. After leaving Square, she went on to business development roles at development studios Blizzard and Red 5, amongst others outside the game industry. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

We had our act together in some parts. We were making it up as we go in other parts. But the product was always number one.

Elaine Di lorio

Manager of business development, Square U.S.

I thought it was a great company. … From a business standpoint, they just seemed to have everything we needed. They understood us, Square and the game. They were a small company, so they were a little more lean and a little more agile. … It wasn’t going into some larger company that we might get lost in.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

It was Dave Cox, Paul Baldwin and Mike McGarvey and Sutton Trout who launched Tomb Raider in November of 1996 and made us the number two publisher in the world, only behind EA. So those guys are good. They knew what they were doing. Tomb Raider was a great game, but great games don’t [sell without marketing]. …

But it was iffy. It was a risk. … We were kind of on the fence, because first of all, would somebody play a Final Fantasy [asynchronous] RPG on a PC, and then also, would people play an async RPG on a PC that’s coming out a year after the console?

Elaine Di lorio

Manager of business development, Square U.S.

I think releasing a PC version was a big risk, but it was also kind of a test. I don’t think [Square] was expecting the same kind of triple-A title that they got on the console, but I think they wanted to kind of try their hand at the PC version and see what would happen.

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

All the producers [at Eidos] were huge fans, and we completely supported the idea. Especially me — I was very excited, super happy. Like, “Oh, we’ve gotta do this no matter what.”

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

[Maruyama] wanted a million eight. And you have to understand Tomb Raider cost $900,000. So [that] was a lot of money for a title at the time — and was a lot of money for PC. And I walked down the hall, and Mike McGarvey was in town. McGarvey ran Europe; I ran U.S. And we went into Rob Stannett’s office, who was the CFO … and Mike picked up a piece of paper off of Rob’s desk, wrote down a million eight … And he just looked at it and said “OK, yeah, that’s about 100,000 units.” And “Rob, what do you think?” And Rob said, “Yeah, we can do that and just move on. Let’s not be stagnant over the decision.” And that was it. That was our green light, and we picked it up. …

That [1.8 million] was the MG, minimum guarantee. … It’s an advance against royalties. We had a royalty deal with them where we published and we gave them a piece of every unit we sold, less certain deductions, and I don’t remember the details of what they were. And the advance, what happens is you give them a forecast: “I think we’ll sell this many. And we’ll back that up by giving you hard dollars, nonrefundable, up front against the earn out.” So we wrote them a check for a million eight as a minimum guarantee to secure the publishing rights on PC. …

We signed a deal about six months after the first meeting, which is record time for a Japanese company.

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

It was a pretty high-profile title in our company, equal to Tomb Raider at the time. It was just a big deal.

William Chen

Lead programmer, Square U.S. (1997-2000)

We had about 15-20 people working on it, mostly in Square’s Costa Mesa office but with some help from Tokyo.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

It was much more work than we thought [it would be]. Because PC was — it was very tough to decide what kind of CPU the game was going to run on, with what kind of graphics card. … We spent lots of time finetuning the technical level of detail.

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

It was a huge risk on the development side, because the team had to do a lot of work. Almost, I believe, 80 percent of the game code was rewritten. They took a very custom-made game for the PlayStation, and they had to extrapolate that and redo a lot of things to make it just work on PC … I actually camped out there for a while because it was getting delayed.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

It was a very complex port. Because there were, if I remember, there were five different game engines.

William Chen

Lead programmer, Square U.S. (1997-2000)

Square had different people writing code for each part of the PlayStation game, with different styles and engines, so it was quite a challenge to unify those on PC with a small team. But overall I’d say the development went better than expected, and the game sold much better than we all expected as well.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

I think we forecast 100,000 units and we did a million plus.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

[I remember it being] 200 in North America, 200 in the European market, and 100,000 in Korea.

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

It sold pretty close to a million at full price, I would say, and then it went into a number of variations — budget versions and whatnot.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

I think the first royalty check we sent them, and Yoshi will never acknowledge this, but he did this because I joke with him a lot about it … The first check we sent them, I think, was $2 million. That means, in the first quarter, we exceeded the million eight, plus another two million in royalties. So we did real well. And Yoshi sent the check back to me. … I get this check on my desk, and I called him up and said, “What are you doing?” And he says, “You didn’t include a royalty statement so we couldn’t accept the check. And I said, “Yoshi, you’re dealing with an American company. Keep the check. Ask for the statement, but don’t send it back to me.” …

It’s funny because the deal actually led to us becoming very close to merging Square and Eidos. The way that we saw it was, our philosophy of game building was very similar. Neither one of us did licensed [intellectual property]. Both of us were focused on very, very high-quality games — high-quality, character-driven games. And we had Europe and the U.S. and they had Japan. And we actually had the first meeting at that E3 in Atlanta, and then the second E3 in Atlanta, we had a meeting [with] the CEO of the holding group, Charles Cornwall, Ian Livingstone, the chairman of the company, and then Miyamoto — the owner of Square, not Miyamoto the Nintendo dude — and then the owner of Digicube, which was a division of Square. We had a big, private dinner and came really close to a merger in ‘98 [but Square decided to go another way]. …

The funny thing is, I got a call [a couple years ago] from Square, because they wanted to rerelease the PC version, and they asked me if I knew where the gold master was. [Laughs] I left the company in 1999. What am I gonna do with that? “Oh yeah, you know, it’s right here in my desk drawer. That big box that I carried out? Yeah, I was carrying the gold master and all the source. Let me just give it to you.” Yeah, they lost it.

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

My understanding is actually — what I’m most kind of proud of — is that they kept the code. I believe the version that they put out on mobile and PS4 is actually the PC code that we worked on.

Frank Hom

Serving as the main point of contact at Eidos, Frank Hom oversaw development of the Final Fantasy 7 PC port, working closely with the development team in Square’s Costa Mesa office. As the PC version ran into delays, he essentially became a middleman between the developers at Square and the executives at Eidos. Hom left Eidos in 2001 and spent nine years as a producer at Ubisoft before joining Sega of America in 2010. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Custom box for Final Fantasy 7

In the ’90s, game publishers often put PC games in custom boxes so they would stand out in stores. For Final Fantasy 7, Eidos went with this triangular look. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Square teams up with Electronic Arts

While Square ended up making money with Final Fantasy 7 PC, the company’s bread and butter remained PlayStation games. And following the completion of the six-game publishing deal with Sony in 1998, Square’s U.S. publishing plans — on both console and PC, including the company’s next big game, Final Fantasy 8 — were up in the air.

Some within Square’s U.S. office wanted to begin to publish games themselves. Others wanted to continue working with Eidos. Square Japan’s executive team had a different plan — teaming up for a distribution deal with Electronic Arts.

Together, the companies formed Square EA as a joint venture to publish Square’s games in the U.S., and EA Square to publish EA’s games in Japan.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

After we finished the Sony deal, the first-party deal … I thought we finally had a chance to be a publisher of our own in the U.S. But all of a sudden, headquarters ordered the joint venture with EA. It was a tough time.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

EA came very strongly to us. They wanted the rights to the PC version [of Final Fantasy 8]. … They negotiated really hard for the PC rights. Because you know, we gave the [FF7 PC] rights to Eidos, and Eidos did tremendous work. So I felt it was right to keep giving the license to Eidos, but you know, we started having the joint venture, so …

[Note: Eidos ended up publishing Final Fantasy 8 on PC in Europe, while Square EA did so in the U.S.]

Final Fantasy 8

The game Electronic Arts had its eyes on when forming Square EA, Final Fantasy 8 went on to sell more than 8 million copies across different platforms. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

When we first released Final Fantasy 7 outside Japan, we had Sony’s help, and we realized that you need strong distribution to succeed outside Japan. And we were wondering if we should go solo or partner up with somebody. And then Miyamoto-san suggested, “Why don’t we become partners with EA to put out our games outside of Japan?” So we went and talked with EA.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

I don’t know why the executives at that time decided to form Square EA. I think it was some sort of political issue.

Keith Boesky

President, Eidos (1997-1999)

[My guess is they did it because] in dealing with Japanese companies, historically there’s a concept in Japan of “famous.” And EA is a famous company, and Eidos wasn’t.

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

We were a new publisher, kind of a hip, new publisher, but we weren’t the known-name, stable publisher, and that was EA at the time. And I think [Square’s] president in Japan decided, “If we’re going to do a long-term commitment, we’re gonna do it with somebody a little more established and not new,” even though the U.S. office group really liked us.

Rex Ishibashi

Vice president of business development, Electronic Arts (1997-2001)

Electronic Arts had more of a track record, and not that this was on the table, but [of] acquisitions and partnering, than I think Eidos did. And I think it’s safe to say it was a much healthier company financially. … Certainly a spark plug in the whole discussion was the success of Final Fantasy 7.

John Riccitiello

President and chief operating officer, Electronic Arts (1998-2004)

[Final Fantasy 7’s success] was all of the reason for wanting to do it. It started with [conversations about wanting] to publish and/or distribute Final Fantasy and it grew into this [joint venture]. … I mean, realistically, when you stand in a room with another smart person, you’ve got an idea, you listen to their ideas, and you settle on one that works for both people. Square had global ambitions and wasn’t willing to sort of cede control in a traditional publishing deal. So we structured something different.

Rex Ishibashi

Vice president of business development, Electronic Arts (1997-2001)

There were two joint ventures — one joint venture set up in Japan where the idea was Square would help EA, and a joint venture set up in North America where EA would help Square. Obviously the biggest clear opportunity, and proven opportunity, was for EA to take over distribution of Final Fantasy and the other Square games in the West. Whether EA had games that would truly, or could truly, crack Japan was another matter.

John Riccitiello

President and chief operating officer, Electronic Arts (1998-2004)

There’s no question that the Western deal worked a lot better. EA didn’t make a lot of content that worked in Japan, culturally, and realistically no Western publisher did. Oddly enough, back in those days it was really unusual for a Western title to get more than 50,000 units in Japan. And so I don’t think that really got off the ground in a huge way. But it was actually never the bigger part of this deal to begin with. It was just reciprocal because two big companies like to imagine they’re reciprocal. … It was really more about the Western deal and the marketing of Final Fantasy. I don’t have the unit numbers in front of us, but they were pretty damn good.

… any time there’s a joint venture of two very powerful, creative, opinionated companies that have had success in their own right, I’m not surprised that there would be disagreements. Rex Ishibashi

Rex Ishibashi

Vice president of business development, Electronic Arts (1997-2001)

It certainly wasn’t perfectly smooth sailing. At the end of the day, Square — even with its U.S. presence — was a very Japanese company. And again, when I say that, I say that respectfully. I don’t mean a big hulking dinosaur like Matsushita or Honda. I mean kind of a new breed of Japanese company that was very aggressive. … And there wasn’t a long history of creative Japanese companies cracking the West as Square was doing, at least in terms of video game unit numbers. There just wasn’t. You can point to things like Godzilla, or whatever you want to point to, and they’re kind of really novelties, right? You can point to Kurosawa films, and 90 percent of the film-going public in the West has no idea who he is. So, long way of saying, it was certainly interesting, because while Japanese games companies were very successful in Japan, of course, there weren’t many independent companies, certainly besides Nintendo, that were really making headway in the way that Square was with the Final Fantasy franchise.

John Riccitiello

President and chief operating officer, Electronic Arts (1998-2004)

I’d say if there was a downside [to Square EA], it was probably a more complicated structure than you needed for what amounted to a publishing deal.

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

Each quarter we’d have board meetings, and we’d meet with [Electronic Arts CEO] Larry Probst and John Riccitiello. But we didn’t really see eye to eye and had a lot of different opinions on a lot of things, so there was a lot of friction there.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

I worked with John Riccitiello. We had quarterly board meetings, and we always fought in those. Maybe he hated me. [Laughs]

John Riccitiello

President and chief operating officer, Electronic Arts (1998-2004)

It was trivial. I mean, first off, the most senior person that was working on the deal [at Square] in the U.S. would have been a junior manager at EA. They were young and inexperienced. … There was a guy, Iwasaki or whatever, at that point. He was also a pretty junior guy, and a good guy — nothing wrong with him. And they always wanted higher volumes and bigger guarantees, and the [EA] sales guy in the U.S. wanted to be a little more conservative and let the market play itself out. You know, the standard friction between somebody that’s responsible for the outcome and someone that’s responsible for a better forecast. There was definitely a little bit of friction. … If you were taking a look at “the battlefield,” it would look peaceful and harmonious from 30 feet in the air. But in the foxhole or under the table, some of the children were foot fighting a little bit, I guess. But it was never much more than that, really.

Rex Ishibashi

Vice president of business development, Electronic Arts (1997-2001)

You know, any time there’s a joint venture of two very powerful, creative, opinionated companies that have had success in their own right, I’m not surprised that there would be disagreements. Especially when you think about cultural differences. We’re talking about two companies that, I think, at every board meeting required a translator. … I very specifically remember, in the early conversations, where we were trying to use a third-party translator to conduct some of the conversations. And Yoshi Maruyama’s English is better than my Japanese, but he and I would be correcting the nuance of the translator. Because it was like, “That’s not quite right.” You know, you take that literally and you’re going to be making decisions based on the wrong information, or the wrong communication.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

Square was focusing on PlayStation only whereas EA was a multiplatform game company. They kept publishing on Nintendo as well as Sega as well as PC. So there was a bit of a different approach because they could spread out marketing across different platforms, but you know, we only published for the PlayStation. So there was that kind of discussion between us — why were we just doing it? [Laughs] We told them that the Japanese game market was always a “winner takes all” type of market. It used to be Nintendo. Now it’s PlayStation, so we had no intent to make any games for other consoles like Sega or Nintendo. But the U.S. market was twice as big. So they understood it, but they still wanted us to make games for other consoles. Which Square, you know, firmly refused.

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

Probably the biggest thing was, EA and Square were really frustrated with each other because, at the time, EA didn’t think that Japanese RPGs would sell in the States at all. And conversely, Square didn’t think that EA’s games, just by localizing them into Japanese, would sell in Japan either.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

I never understood Square EA. … After we finished the EA deal — so five years after — finally we did our own publishing in the U.S. When we did that, we made huge profits compared to previous years.

John Riccitiello

President and chief operating officer, Electronic Arts (1998-2004)

It was never intended to be forever. You know, so, it worked out nicely. I don’t think there’s any hard feelings either way. … Partnership worked out. EA made revenue and profit. Square made revenue and profit. Square brands got better established in the West. And I maintain a relationship to this day with Square. It’s a very positive one.

Games

Square EA’s output ran the gamut, from mainstream hits like Kingdom Hearts to critical disappointment The Bouncer and hardcore fan favorite Xenogears. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Square makes a Final Fantasy movie

Of Square’s post-Final Fantasy 7 initiatives, many say the most ambitious was its studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, which the company opened in 1997.

While Square had multiple studios around the world, the idea behind the Hawaii studio was that it wouldn’t just develop games. It would also make movies. As Square had ramped up its CG resources working on cutscenes for FF7, Sakaguchi saw the potential to push that technology further.

The first result of that idea, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” was a big-budget film loosely connected to the rest of the Final Fantasy series. The movie hit theaters in 2001.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

Toward the end of Final Fantasy 7, Sakaguchi-san came to visit my desk and said, “Oh, we have a lot of movie clips in Final Fantasy 7. We may be able to make a movie now.” And I said, “Are you serious?”

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

After the success of Final Fantasy 7, there were two main things that changed, two main goals that we set for ourselves. The first thing is we wanted to put a lot of power behind our graphics capabilities, because we were thinking in five or 10 years that was going to be the big thing in games. That was one of the reasons why we decided to make the Final Fantasy movie. Then the second thing was we knew that network features were going to be a big deal, so that’s why we decided to take Final Fantasy online [with Final Fantasy 11].

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

You know, when Sakaguchi-san asked me to join Square, I told him that if Square was thinking about just competing with Sega or Namco, I wouldn’t be interested. If Square really wanted to compete with Disney or other global entertainment companies, then it would be very exciting.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

This was Sakaguchi-san’s dream. He wanted to make the first 3D graphics movie.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

In some ways, Sakaguchi-san had a lot of flexibility to do what he wanted after Final Fantasy 7’s success, but Square wasn’t just his company. Square was a very ambitious company, and as a digital entertainment company, we were talking about wanting to be bigger than Disney. So we were thinking, “OK, what is a digital entertainment company? What’s the definition?” And then we came across the idea of, “We’re not just a company that makes games. So why don’t we make movies as well?”

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

Right as we finished Final Fantasy 7, Sakaguchi-san asked me to build up the movie production studio in Hawaii. Most people at Square had one month off, a one-month vacation. I didn’t. [Laughs] I needed to work on this movie project. I got involved with the Hawaii studio from the very beginning, to find office space, until the lease ran out. So I was there from the very beginning to the very end. The whole time was about five years, 1997 to 2002.

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

Sakaguchi-san, he left for Hawaii and built a studio in Honolulu, and from that point on, he had nothing to do with Square’s games in Japan anymore. He just concentrated on making the movie.

Motonori Sakakibara

Movie director, Square

Officially, the reason for Hawaii was that we could connect all the artists from Japan and America, and Hawaii is the middle point between both countries. … [But we moved there] because Sakaguchi-san liked Hawaii.

As Square began hiring staff in the mid-’90s to make high-end computer graphics, Motonori Sakakibara joined the team, first working on the Final Fantasy 6: The Interactive CG Game tech demo, then overseeing Final Fantasy 7’s cutscenes. He went on to co-direct Square’s movie “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” and then started a CG animation company called Sprite Animation with a team of about 10 people who had worked on “Spirits Within.” In 2017, he runs Sprite Animation alongside former Square senior vice president Junichi Yanagihara. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

[Note: When the movie hit theatres, it was a critical and commercial failure. On the aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, it earned a critic score of 44% and an audience score of 48%. Team members credit the reaction to three things: the story not appealing to a Western audience, the characters looking realistic but not like recognizable stars and the release being close to 9/11. Some also note, though, that challenges behind the scenes played a role in the end result.]

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

We needed to decide how to build the movie production. Game production is like a small-scale factory, but movie production needs to be a large-scale factory … Not easy. [Laughs] You know Pixar? They spent about 10 years to build a movie pipeline in their studio. Square did it in just two years.

Junichi Yanagihara

Executive vice president, Square USA

Whenever you make a movie for the first time, there is a learning curve. … And sometimes, as you can imagine, there is what we call “development hell” in which many different people come in and try to give so much input that it causes a delay of the process. As a result, we couldn’t reach the consensus as to what to do with the story.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

Working in the game industry [in Japan, we were used to] working until very late at night. … Many of the people were from the U.S. or other nations, and they’d prioritize their personal lives. They wouldn’t stay at the office so late. Usually they would go home at 7 or 8 at the latest. Things were all different.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

The checks and balances weren’t there. I think, in terms of producing a game, Sakaguchi-san was probably pretty reliable in terms of his beat in terms of what worked and what didn’t work. But when it came to working in a different medium, I think … the fact that there wasn’t really anybody there to provide objective and constructive criticism was a detriment.

Alexander O. Smith

Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002)

The movie … was an unmitigated disaster. … I talked to the lawyer, and I just remember at a party, but she was the lawyer from Hawaii who had handled their applications for doing the movie there. And there were so many tax benefits on the table, and they didn’t take a single one. Because they went in and they were like, “We’re bringing our team.” And they were like, “You hire 10 percent Hawaiian and you get this huge tax cut.” And I don’t think it was like Sakaguchi sitting there going, “No, we’re keeping it pure. It’s our team.” I don’t think there was any thought at all. I think it was like, that came in and the whole organization was so dysfunctional that when that kind of news hits the grind, it never gets to the person that needs to hear it.

And that’s the problem when you’ve got that kind of power structure. It’s like a family thing. And this is endemic in Japanese companies where it operates like a family instead of a business. And so, if something isn’t on the family’s radar, it just doesn’t happen. And there are so many missed opportunities there. So apparently, they could have saved so much money — millions of dollars — if they had taken advantage of these really easy [opportunities]. They just had to hire janitors locally, really, and they could have done it.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I think [Final Fantasy 7’s success] changed [Sakaguchi’s] style in a slightly negative way. [Laughs] He thought he could do anything within the company. That’s why he started investing even more money in Final Fantasy the movie, which became one of the biggest flops. That made him a little out of control. The original budget of the film was like $40 million dollars, and it [ended up costing] close to $150 million. So when I actually did the calculation on how much it was going to cost based on the number of people Sakaguchi wanted to assign, I quickly figured out it couldn’t be finished for $40 million. But you know, they did it anyway. They kept investing more money.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

There’s sort of this expression in Japan where you say, “It’s somebody else’s money.” And you can take it as, “You need to treat it with respect because it’s not yours.” Or you can say, “Well it’s not mine, so it’s there to spend.”

Junichi Yanagihara

Executive vice president, Square USA

It was all funded by Square itself. It was self-funded. And sooner or later, if you study and analyze this, you’ll probably run into some articles about what happened. … After the film project, Square went through a financially challenging time.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

With the money we earned from Final Fantasy 7, we decided, “OK let’s use half of it as an investment for the future, and let’s save the other half.” So because of that, we didn’t go into a management crisis when the movie underperformed. … From a business point of view it wasn’t a success. But I feel like a Japanese game publisher in the year 2000 creating a movie in CG was a big accomplishment, so I don’t regret making it at all. I think it’s something that people will come around to praise in the long run.

Junichi Yinaghihara

A former lawyer in Seattle, Junichi Yanagihara helped Square establish three offices over the course of the ’90s. He started with Square’s first U.S. headquarters in Redmond, Wash., then helped open its game production studio in Los Angeles, then finally helped open its movie studio in Honolulu. Yanagihara stayed with the Honolulu studio until its final day in 2002, tying up the remaining legal issues, then branched out with a team of former co-workers to start independent CG animation studio Sprite Animation, which has credits including TV show “Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures.” | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Final fantasy book and two versions of Spirits within DVD

In addition to releasing two versions of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” on DVD, Square worked with author Steven Kent and strategy guide publisher BradyGames to produce a book covering the movie’s tech, design and script. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Sakaguchi leaves Square and the company begins to change

Following the struggles of “Spirits Within,” Square ran into another issue: The company delayed its next major game release, Final Fantasy 10. While game industry delays are common and the company had plenty of smaller projects to keep things moving forward, the combination of two big financial setbacks so close together put Square in a tough position.

Eventually, both Sakaguchi and Takechi left the company.

With the departures of its top creative and business figures, Square — for many — began to feel like a different company.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

In 2001, the fiscal year ending in March, that was the first year that Square ever went into the red. … The movie was the main reason for that. But we also delayed Final Fantasy 10 past the end of the fiscal year, and that was another big factor. … And to take responsibility for going into the red, I decided to step down and leave the company. Then Sakaguchi-san said, “Well, it’s not fair for you to have to leave, so I’ll take responsibility and leave as well.” That’s why Sakaguchi-san left.

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

There were many, many reasons why I left. [Laughs] But to try and sum it up … My official title was executive vice president, and that meant, of course, that I had a mountain of administrative tasks to attend to. Every morning I would have a stack of papers waiting on my desk to review and approve. If there was a change to the labor laws, for instance, I had to go through training and then update our employee policies. There was a ton of work like that, but I wanted to be involved in creating things again, so all this stress was just building up in me. I really loved Square, you know, and I was grateful for my position, but it just didn’t feel like me. That feeling was the main reason I quit.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

For me, it was like, “Huh? What happened?” [Laughs] There was a generational difference, you see. There was Sakaguchi-san’s generation, then there was Kitase-san’s generation, then below that were younger guys like me. And we didn’t have that much direct contact with the older guys. … It took awhile before anyone even told me he had quit! I think I was one of the last people to know. I remember how, when I came into work that day, everyone had this somber look on their face.

Alexander O. Smith

Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002)

Personally, I was like, “Oh, end of an era,” you know. But I didn’t feel like — because so much of the time I was there, and I hate to come back to this yet again, but it was the movie. And so, it didn’t seem like such a bad thing. And certainly the guy’s got more stories left in him. It didn’t seem like that was the place to tell them.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

I left Square because Sakaguchi-san left. I had a position in the Tokyo office, so I could have gone back [after the Honolulu studio closed], but it felt like the company had changed a lot.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

I shouldn’t be saying this, but hmm, how to put this? It was like Sangokushi [the Chinese literary series “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”]. You know, where the king dies, and then a civil war erupts and everyone starts fighting each other.

It was like Sangokushi [the Chinese literary series “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”]. You know, where the king dies, and then a civil war erupts and everyone starts fighting each other. Tetsuya Nomura
Square headquarter in Shinjuku

In 2012, Square Enix moved its headquarters to a building in Shinjuku, where it continues to operate today. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Let’s see, what can I say here? At the time, Sakaguchi-san held a unique position at Square. He was simultaneously an executive vice president, a board member of the company and a game developer himself. There’s no one quite like that in the company today, so in that sense, things did change a lot.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Yeah, Sakaguchi-san had shaped so many different things at Square. Now there’s multiple, different voices.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

That singular vision kind of changed when he left — as Nomura said, instead of Sakaguchi-san deciding things alone, when he left, there was a greater diversity of ideas that flowed in.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

It’s one of those [things] where, when somebody like Sakaguchi-san, who had such authority in the company, kind of just disappears, there’s this vacuum that exists where nobody can really arbitrate between your devs and your artists and your game designers. And in that environment, most people — especially in Square — tended to avoid conflict and try to resolve things as best as possible. And unfortunately, the way each individual tried to resolve it wasn’t necessarily in the end user’s interests.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto

CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA

Especially during the Final Fantasy 7 period, Sakaguchi-san made every big decision. That was why everybody moved quickly. It was so exciting. And after Sakaguchi-san left, no one wanted to take responsibility, so all the decision making needed lots of approvals, which took a long, long time. The company didn’t move very quickly. It suffered from “big company disease.”

Shinichiro Kajitani

Vice president, Square USA

When Sakaguchi-san wanted to make a decision, it would just happen like that. But after he left, several people had to do it. … It became more of a committee-based thing, so it took a lot more time to get things done.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

Management was totally changing at Squaresoft. They went from one extreme to the other. Before then, they had no control over costs. But all of a sudden, cost control became a big deal.

Motonori Sakakibara

Movie director, Square

The company seemed like it was becoming [more about costs than creativity]. At the beginning of this interview, I mentioned that Square was very creative — the first priority was creativity, right? But I think after the movie project, they changed some of the direction of the company, especially after Sakaguchi left.

Junichi Yanagihara

Executive vice president, Square USA

It was a big event, the period between 1995 and 2001. … Everything went by very quickly and very dramatically.

Alexander O. Smith

Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002)

It was the transition from the family business to the business business. … Everything got stratified and there was more division between departments. We had to do — oh yeah, there was all this reporting stuff that went on. Like, “What did you do this quarter? How did things work out?” That sort of stuff. So yeah, it was a cultural shift.

Tomoyuki Takechi

President and chief executive officer, Square

When I left the company … things were changing a lot. Personally, leaving the company was, of course, a sad time. But I thought that the company seemed to be headed for big things, so I was happy for it. … I always feel like if you don’t take risks, the flowers aren’t going to bloom. So I’m happy things worked out for the company after I left.

Square makes Final Fantasy 7 into its own franchise

In the early 2000s, as Takechi and Sakaguchi left Square, and others, including new president Yoichi Wada, took over, Square wasn’t only changing behind the scenes. It was also changing its output, as Final Fantasy shifted from a franchise with one new sequel every couple of years to a franchise with multiple branches and spin-off titles releasing more frequently.

In 2003, one of these branches took the form of what Square called the “Compilation of Final Fantasy 7” — a series of a new CG film, ”Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children,” and three FF7 spin-off games. Some saw this as Square whipping the horse too hard to get more sales out of the Final Fantasy brand. Others liked the variety and creativity behind the approach.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I think it was important to get somebody [running the company after Sakaguchi left] who had a different perspective on the business of making games. And it’s not the actual development of games per se, but to actually be shipping games and selling games.

Yoichi Wada

President and chief executive officer, Square/Square Enix (2001-2013)

When I joined the company in the year 2000, I foresaw that the game industry would get bigger and more diversified, and I knew I’d need to make changes in order to respond to that. So the goals prior to 2000, and the targets Square needed to work on after 2000, were a little bit different. …

One unique thing about the Final Fantasy franchise is that, usually if you have a series of numbered games, the protagonist remains the same and you have a central theme that connects the series. But with Final Fantasy, every game is different from the last. So because of that, we decided to create subseries within the overall series. So there’s a Final Fantasy 7 series of games underneath it, and Final Fantasy 10 has its own spin-off games underneath it.

Jun Iwasaki

Vice president of marketing, Square U.S.

I was disappointed because they wore out Final Fantasy. I heard after I left the company … that Final Fantasy’s loyalty decreased with U.S. customers.

Alexander O. Smith

Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002)

Well, I mean, it’s that problem of you have to balance making money with a known cash cow against diluting the IP. So yeah, well, what are you going to do? I think that’s symptomatic of Square. I think it would be awesome if, in an alternate universe, Square could say, “OK, we’re just having 50 people now. Everyone else is going to take a vacation for two years. And these 50 people are going to make a Final Fantasy game.” You know, and what happens? What do they do? That would be really cool to see. But impossible. And when the balance sheet is determining everything, then I think you back yourself into that situation where, “We have to release things.”

Nobuo Uematsu

Music composer, Square Japan

Personally, I want each game in a series to be treated with a lot of care, so I’m not a big fan of one game having a bunch of spin-offs and sequels. But I understand that from a company, sales, money point of view, it makes sense.

Yoichi Wada

A few years after Final Fantasy 7’s launch, Yoichi Wada stepped in to take over Square’s operations. Some on the team disagreed with his approach of putting more formal processes in place, lining up multiple Final Fantasy spinoff games, merging with Enix and acquiring Taito, Eidos and others. But Wada held his role until 2013, when he stepped down to form experimental cloud gaming team Shinra Technologies, which Square initially funded. Wada remained with Square in a reduced capacity as chairman of the board of the company’s Tokyo subsidiary for two years, then left to focus on Shinra, which went under in 2016. Following Shinra’s demise, Wada has advised a variety of companies in the game industry. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Tech demo

For Sony’s PlayStation 3 unveiling press conference in 2005, Square Enix put together a tech demo to show what Final Fantasy 7 could theoretically look like on the hardware. The result led to plenty of speculation that Square was working on a full remake, which team members say wasn’t true. Instead, they say Sony requested a tech demo from Square Enix for the event — either of an updated FF7 or of a new Final Fantasy title — and the team only had a month to put it together, so it had to go with something familiar.

Yoichi Wada

President and chief executive officer, Square/Square Enix (2001-2013)

It’s true that we had financial reasons for it. When I joined in 2000, Square was on the verge of going bankrupt. And right before merging with Enix, Final Fantasy 10-2 contributed to our overall profit, which was the greatest in Square’s history. We were able to go out on a high note. But also from the consumer’s side, Final Fantasy has great stories and solid characters, and people wanted to see where characters came from and what their backstories were and what happened next. We got a lot of requests from people along those lines, so in some ways we were just responding to those requests. …

One thing I made sure of was that we had the same creators work on each of the spin-offs. So if it’s a spin-off of Final Fantasy 7, I made sure that Kitase-san and Nomura-san were the key creators to do it, or else it would turn into a different game.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

From the beginning, we planned to only do four spin-offs of Final Fantasy 7, and we publicly announced that [the Compilation of Final Fantasy 7] would end with those four. We planned it that way ourselves so we wouldn’t oversaturate the market.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I think it has a lot to do with how you sort of massage your user’s expectation. A lot of these spin-offs — at least my impression [is they came] after the fact. “Oh, we’ve spent so much time and so much money creating this, and now we don’t have as much. But we left an opening here that we might be able to exploit.”

Frank Hom

Associate producer, Eidos (1995-2001)

I believe, if those games were uniform in quality — some of them were fantastic, and some of them were just mediocre — but I think if they were uniform in quality, people wouldn’t be able to get enough. They would want more and more Final Fantasy. And I think even today, people want more and more Final Fantasy.

spinoff games, books, magazines and memorabilia

Almost 10 years after Final Fantasy 7’s release, Square made it into a franchise of its own, with spinoff games, books, magazines, memorabilia and even a movie. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Square staff reunites at Microsoft

As Square went through changes in the early 2000s, Sakaguchi, Takechi and Hashimoto weren’t the only staff to leave. For a company with hundreds of employees, some turnover was normal. Yet it turned out that a handful of team members ended up working together a second time as part of Microsoft’s then-newly-formed Tokyo studio built to support the Xbox in Japan.

In one chain of hiring, Microsoft brought in Square’s Takayuki Suguro, who then brought over Yoshinari, who then brought over Kawai. Along with a handful of other ex-Square employees — such as Maruyama, who took over as managing director of Microsoft Japan in 2003 — some say it felt like a small reunion at Microsoft.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

It’s not that we were trying to rebuild the team from Square at Microsoft on purpose or build the new Square or anything like that, but I and Sugaro-san and a guy named [Daisuke] Fukugawa and another guy name [Soichiro] Yasui who worked on Final Fantasy 9, we all joined around the same time. I guess it was a bit coincidental. And there were a few other people from Square there as well.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

Personally, I’m an Apple person. You would not find me dead with a PC in my house. I just grew up with Apple, so it’s one of those “hell would freeze over before I would go to Microsoft” kind of things. But considering that there weren’t really opportunities that were interesting in Square, and that hopefully with a clean slate and with Microsoft’s expertise in mass-producing software that I’d be able to do something different, I decided to take the leap.

I told Sakaguchi-san that [after I made the decision to leave Square and he was still there], and I guess maybe this was his policy with everybody: “You can leave me once. I’ll forgive you once. But just this once.”

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

Basically everything was different between Square and Microsoft. But if I had to choose the most significant difference, it was that we didn’t [initially] have anyone at Microsoft that was like Sakaguchi-san back at Square, that powerful leader who really kind of had that aura of leadership and drove everyone forward.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

[For the original Xbox] Microsoft wanted to ship a game that only Japanese people could play, and they had three teams internally. Two of those teams kind of croaked. Our team was essentially on life support until I decided to raise my hand and say, “I’ll take full responsibility.” The title that ended up shipping was Magatama. It never got ported over to the States. It’s a hack and slash game, nothing special, but we did ship, which I considered, at that time, to be my primary objective. …

At that point in Microsoft Japan, as you can imagine, morale was very low. Two of those three projects did not ship. Teams got canceled. Even feedback that Japanese devs tried to give back to HQ wasn’t being reflected. There was this big hoopla about the Duke controller that came out initially. …

A lot of people were generally suspicious of Microsoft HQ. But then Maruyama-san came along and he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of all the politics.”

Hiroshi Kawai

An MIT graduate, Hiroshi Kawai initially interviewed with Square to be a translator, hoping to get his foot in the door. Then Square hired him as a game designer, and then he quickly shifted over to what he really wanted to do — programming — and he started experimenting with early Nintendo 64 and PlayStation hardware research and helping with the Final Fantasy 6: The Interactive CG Game tech demo. He went on to work as a programmer on Final Fantasy 7, then later became a lead programmer on Final Fantasy 9. In the early 2000s, he left Square to join Microsoft and worked as a producer and lead programmer on a variety of games including Lost Odyssey. Following that, he started his own programming studio, In Control, which works on various projects outside the game industry. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I happened to know [Microsoft executive] Robbie Bach from the early days of Xbox. So he contacted me one day and he told me that he was looking for a managing director of the Xbox operation in Japan. I was a little nervous because the Xbox in Japan had been a big challenge. But they told me that the company was committed to keep operating worldwide, including Japan. So that’s why I took the job.

[Note: Upon joining Microsoft, one of Maruyama’s first tasks was to reach out to Sakaguchi, whom he knew from his days at Square. Sakaguchi had started an independent studio called Mistwalker, built as a small group to oversee and produce games, rather than to do the heavy lifting itself on big projects. And Maruyama wanted to sign Mistwalker — and the other staff Mistwalker needed — to make new role-playing games for Xbox 360, in the hope of repeating the success of games like Final Fantasy 7. This led to the creation of two new games: Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey.]

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

Sakaguchi was already independent after the, I shouldn’t call it, big trouble of the Final Fantasy film. So I wanted to bring him back in.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

Despite the drawbacks that I knew that Microsoft had at the time, I think Microsoft was one of the few places in Japan that had the financial clout to pull off something of a Sakaguchi-class game.

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

It was really kind of a shock, in a good way. Because we had Maruyama-san, Kawai-san, and Sakaguchi-san all together for a game called Lost Odyssey. And after moving from Square to Microsoft, I never thought I’d get to work with Sakaguchi-san again, so getting those three guys and some others on this new project, it really was a pretty big deal.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I went to approach Sakaguchi-san, telling him that Kawai-san was with us. That’s why — because of him, I think Sakaguchi decided to work with us.

tatsuya Yoshinari

As a student, Tatsuya Yoshinari was such a fan of the early Final Fantasy titles that he made his own role-playing game and sent it to Square. Someone at the company liked it enough to offer him a job, and in 1995 he started as a programmer on the Super Famicom board game Koi wa Balance. Next he joined the Final Fantasy 7 team, working on the motorcycle chase and roller coaster minigames, then moved on to Square’s action RPG Parasite Eve and Final Fantasy 9. After that, he left to join Microsoft and assisted on titles such as RPG Lost Odyssey. As the years went on, he left Microsoft and took a networking job with internet company Rakuten. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

[Maruyama] called me up and said, “I’m trying to get Sakaguchi-san to come over and work on a 360 project.” And he got us together, and I convinced Sakaguchi-san that — it’s kind of unorthodox from a Japanese point of view, but from a pure development point of view, Microsoft does have its assets. They do have their strengths. You just need to understand them and work in concert with them. Unfortunately, that “in concert” part kind of fell apart during the latter portions.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I was hoping that Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon would come at the launch of the Xbox 360, which didn’t happen because of the delays of the projects.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

So after Sakaguchi-san came on board, we were working on a prototype with a very small team [for the game that became Lost Odyssey]. … And trying to get a game engine put together for the 360 developed internally in Microsoft Japan was proving to be very [challenging].

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

Lost Odyssey was a really difficult project. That was when it really kind of hit home that, with all the new technology we had — and especially with very limited human resource support — it really was difficult to make very nice, high-end graphics. And at the time, we were working on the Unreal Engine, but it was still kind of in development itself. The game and engine were being developed simultaneously, and they both had bugs that needed to be worked out. So what would happen was we would update the engine, and then the game would no longer function, and we’d have to go and work that out and figure out how to match it up with the newest version and everything. We kind of had to wait for the engine to catch up with parts of the game. So yeah, it took a lot of work, and making the graphics look as good as they could was really difficult.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

Unreal, in terms of graphics, it’s very capable and very, very impressive. But it was still essentially in alpha stage when they were trying to push it onto us. … And even the devs [at Epic], their attitude — I’m not saying this with any disrespect, but it was one of those, “If you don’t like it, don’t use it” [situations]. Their devs were very clear from the get-go, saying, “This is what Unreal’s made for, and if it fits your needs, great. If it doesn’t, you’re on your own. If you need documentation, read the source code. If you need help, write us in English.” …

And while we were making a little progress on that front, we were running into personnel issues in terms of trying to hire people. Microsoft has this interesting sort of hiring scheme where, even if you say you had $100 million in your budget, you would be capped to this thing called “headcount” and it would be completely independent of your budget. So you may only have a headcount for two full-time employees even though you have a massive budget, and you could not increase that. You’d have to essentially trade horses with some other team who’s willing to give up their headcount, and even then it’s still a precious commodity.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

We couldn’t use Microsoft employees to complete the projects because their overhead was very expensive. So we had no choice but to create a separate company. … It was a paper company just to hire developers.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

So it came to this point where it was like … we just weren’t going to get the people we needed within Microsoft, so it would be better to spin the team off into a separate company. But creating a company from scratch would be risky, so we would like to have somebody ‘sponsor.’ And that’s where they found Cavia, who was willing to take the team on and sort of be a sibling of our team. [Even then] it was very difficult to convince people to move over.

So despite having this new company … we were just calling it NewCo at the time, before it became feelplus — and although we had this shell of the company to work with, we still couldn’t get our devs. And I don’t know who got wind of it first, but … there was a role-playing game that was being developed by a company called Nautilus, who was a subsidiary of … Aruze, who was primarily into pachinko games in Japan. …

I think they were no longer interested in maintaining that team. They were saying, “If anybody’s interested in taking this team on, we’re here to listen.” And they had a full dev team there, and the dev team had been making role-playing games at that point. So the powers that be thought, “Hey, why not just combine those guys with existing Microsoft guys and we now have double the capacity, so look out.”

Well, unfortunately it didn’t, because the guys from Nautilus — I guess they were kind of given the cold shoulder. I mean, they were essentially being kicked out on the street, although they didn’t end up being on the street because we picked them up so quickly, but they were kind of treated that way, so they were very suspicious of the guys from Microsoft. And especially the devs were absolutely not interested in using Unreal. They were saying, “You cannot trust code written by a third party. We have no idea what’s in it. We won’t be able to customize it.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. So we have 10 engineers from Nautilus, 10 plus engineers from Microsoft, and they’re not talking to each other.

[Note: After many political ups and downs, including multiple role changes and joining the development team at feelplus, Kawai decided to resign.]

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

It had gotten to a point where it had taken a toll on me physically … My day-to-day work cycle was I would go [to the office] one day, sleep overnight, and then stay at the office until the last train [the next day]. I would only go back home once every two days. And it was just getting to the point where — the [Tokyo Game Show] demo that we shipped, I just, my body was going to fall apart or something else was going to fall apart. So I said, “I will get the TGS demo done. I will get it to the point where you can build upon that and finish the game. But after that, I just cannot do this job.”

Tatsuya Yoshinari

Programmer, Square Japan

It was really difficult working in that environment with two separate teams and hierarchies because the management lines weren’t clearly set as far as who reports to whom, and who’s whose boss and everything. For example, Kawai-san, who had been my boss at Square, went over to feelplus, and basically for the first time, he was no longer my boss. And that was pretty strange, that this guy who had been my boss for a while suddenly wasn’t anymore, even though I was still working with him. And even though he technically wasn’t my boss anymore, the guy who was in place as my manager wasn’t really exactly the best fit for the job. So to be honest, deep down, I never really considered that guy to be my boss. I trusted Kawai-san a lot more. … So yeah, it was a bit difficult working with two separate teams and two separate hierarchies with really kind of vague and not very clear-cut management report lines.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

During Lost Odyssey, it was very difficult working with [Sakaguchi], not only because he has his own style of getting things done, [but also because of the culture at Microsoft]. It wasn’t important just to get that game out. It was important to get their employees to develop themselves, and maybe this is going too far by saying shipping something was a side effect, but it kind of felt like that at times, being a manager at Microsoft. And that conflicts very, very much with the way that Japanese games tended to get developed, where you’d have this sort of authoritarian, almost dictator-like director at the very top who not only handled creative decisions but also handled HR decisions and had full authority there. It just didn’t work that way at Microsoft. …

I didn’t talk to [Sakaguchi] when I finally decided to leave. But I did get an email from him [later on] saying, ”Lost Odyssey shipped, and maybe we could have a chat over drinks.” Because I guess maybe he felt guilty. Maybe he wanted to get things sort of out in the air. At that point, I was just kind of tired and I declined.

Blue Dragon

Mistwalker’s Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey filled a genre gap in Microsoft’s Xbox 360 lineup and earned loyal fans, but the games weren’t successful enough to become new franchises like Final Fantasy. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Final Fantasy 7: Epilogue

Square Enix remakes Final Fantasy 7

In the 20 years since Final Fantasy 7’s release, a lot has changed. Square is now Square Enix, having merged with its former rival, and has acquired former independent publishers Taito and Eidos. In 2017, the company juggles a large roster of franchises, including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. And it releases multiple Final Fantasy projects every year — even occasional CG movies.

But over most of that time, one thing has remained constant for many fans: A desire for a Final Fantasy 7 remake. In part fueled by a 2005 PlayStation 3 tech demo that showed what a graphically upgraded version of the game could look like, the idea of a remake became something of a myth, with fans constantly hoping and speculating but never getting any concrete information to know whether anything was in development.

Then in 2015, after years of fan requests and rumors, Square Enix showed a trailer at Sony’s E3 press conference to announce the game everyone had been waiting for.

“Remake,” the title appeared. Some fans cried with happiness.

As part of the remake announcement, Square Enix revealed that Tetsuya Nomura will serve as the game’s director, Yoshinori Kitase the producer and Kazushige Nojima the scenario writer, reuniting three of the original game’s creative leads.

Kitase and Nomura on stage for ff7 remake unveiling

At Sony’s PlayStation Experience event in 2015, Final Fantasy 7 Remake producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Tetsuya Nomura revealed the first public footage from the game. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

[Note: In Sakaguchi’s first interview for this story, conducted in late 2014 — prior to Square Enix’s announcement — we asked him about his thoughts on a potential FF7 remake.]

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

In general, I don’t like remakes. When I was at Square, I was opposed to making them. If people were going to spend time and effort on a remake, I thought that time would be better spent on something new. And I still feel the same way.

[Note: After Square Enix’s announcement and first two trailers for the game appeared, we followed up to see if his opinion had changed.]

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

Back when I ran development at Square, I would say, “Let’s not do remakes.” I was always thinking, “Rather than remakes, let’s put that energy into new projects.” But time has passed, and now we can construct game worlds with CG far more detailed than what I was thinking of at the time. Now that we’ve reached this level, you can’t help but get excited about the possibilities. [Laughs] With the announcement of the FF7 remake, I’m looking forward to it both as its father and as a player. If possible, I’d like to see a scalpel taken to not just the visuals, but the game mechanics as well, to create something that we can become even more deeply immersed in.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

We’ve talked about doing a Final Fantasy 7 remake for a long time, and, over the years, sometimes it would come up, sometimes it would go away. Depending on my schedule, maybe I was too busy to actually tackle the project, or something else would come up. So it’s been around, but it never came to pass. But now that I have a little bit of availability in my schedule, we decided that we wanted to go ahead and kick it off. And we wanted to make sure that we could do it while we still have certain people around that were on the original Final Fantasy 7. Because we didn’t want to end up passing it on to a generation that doesn’t know the original game. We wanted to make sure to keep the integrity of Final Fantasy 7, that we make sure that Kitase-san is involved and Nojima-san are involved and I am involved. That’s one of the reasons why we’re doing it now.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

[To Nomura:] It’s been awhile since we’ve worked together, hasn’t it?

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Yeah, it has.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Now that I think back on it, was there anything we worked on together after FF7?

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

There was FF13.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Yeah, but we weren’t really working together that closely. … Up to FF7, we’d mostly worked on the same team. Then there was FF8, which you contributed some battle and character ideas to, and you’ve done various character design work for other projects over the years, but I think the last game we were really deeply involved in together was FF7.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Yeah. So… how is it [working together again]?

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

I don’t remember you being this … detailed with your instructions. [Laughs]

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

Yes, yes I am.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

He’s very, very detail oriented. And he really pushes right up to that final deadline — or past it.

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

That’s only when we haven’t gotten approval from the higher-ups yet.

Yoshinori Kitase

Director, Square Japan

Oh? That’s funny, I don’t remember it being like that before. [Laughs]

Tetsuya Nomura

Character and battle visual director, Square Japan

For the people involved in making Final Fantasy 7, I’m sure it holds a special place in their heart. It was such a revolutionary title, and people who played it thought it was such a big turning point for the Final Fantasy franchise, because that was the first time we implemented 3D polygons and it was so different from the previous iterations. So … there is something special for me about going back to that game now.

Hiroshi Matsuyama

As the head of independent development studio CyberConnect2, Hiroshi Matsuyama has been overseeing Naruto and .hack games, among others, for the past 15 years. Now his team is working with Square Enix on the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. “Unfortunately, right now, we’ve been told by Square Enix, ‘Don’t talk about it at all,’” he says. Matsuyama acknowledges, though, that CyberConnect2’s large number of artists, animators and cinematics staff is “probably one of the reasons Square hired us.” | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Prior to Square Enix announcing the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, then-president Yoichi Wada said that he didn’t want the company to remake FF7 until it had produced another game that exceeded its quality and impact, which he didn’t feel it had done. Following the Remake announcement and after Wada had stepped down, Polygon asked him if he felt the company had done so. “Obviously I did say that, and I still believe it,” he said. “I’m not completely in the loop as to what the current project is now, so I don’t want to say too much on that. … It’s not going to be an easy challenge to meet the high fan expectations, but they’ve announced it and I’d very much like for it to deliver on the promise it has.” Later, Polygon asked FF7 Remake director Tetsuya Nomura if Wada leaving played a role in the team moving forward with the project. “I don’t believe it’s related,” he said.

Everyone goes their separate ways

As of this story going live, Final Fantasy 7 is on the verge of its 20th anniversary, and most of the key people involved in its creation and release have left Square Enix — many of them landing in high-profile roles in and around the game industry.

Uematsu, for instance, is one of the game industry’s most acclaimed freelance composers, recently working on Japanese mobile RPG success story Granblue Fantasy. Amano is one of the most popular artists in Japan, selling some new mainstream work for six figures while dabbling in occasional game industry jobs. And Iwasaki runs GungHo Online America, the U.S. branch of the company behind Japanese mobile chart-topper Puzzle & Dragons.

Meanwhile, Sakaguchi runs production studio Mistwalker, a small team that has worked on various role-playing games over the past decade — even an RPG published by Nintendo in certain territories called The Last Story. Sakaguchi says, at this point, he no longer has career ambitions outside of games; that he doesn’t have another film in him and he’s focused on continuing to make an impact on the game industry instead.

Polygon give-away signed postcard

Following its announcement of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Square Enix gave the press postcards signed by producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Tetsuya Nomura. Check Polygon shortly after this story posts for a chance to win them and other Final Fantasy 7-related items. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

In April 2015, he said Mistwalker had begun work on a console version of its mobile game Terra Battle. In February 2016, Mistwalker and Silicon Studio announced a collaboration to develop a new project. And in June 2016, Sakaguchi said he was starting a new development studio of his own that will experiment with mixing video streaming into game design.

Looking back, Sakaguchi says Final Fantasy 7 marked a personal career highlight, though not one that eclipses the others he’s seen over the years.

Asked if he thinks his career has changed course because of Final Fantasy 7, he says, “I hear that a lot, but to me the change didn’t feel so sudden. The game was very successful, but really it felt like part of the momentum we had been building since the first Final Fantasy.”

For many on the team, though, FF7 stands out as not only a successful game, but a standout moment in their careers, a rare case of resources matching ambition at a turning point in the game industry.

“It was a Final Fantasy full of so many firsts, and I still love the fact we challenged ourselves to the fullest in every aspect — the world, the designs, the execution, etc.,” says Square Japan art director Yusuke Naora. “Given the technical constraints of that time, I have no complaints.” Babykayak

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Credits

Published on Jan 09, 2017, 09:00am PST

Writer

Matt Leone

Designer

Brittany Holloway-Brown

Video shooters

Forbes Conrad (Amano/Hashimoto)

Sara Masetti (Uematsu)

James Mielke (Nomura)

Scott Nelson (Uematsu)

Video editor

Clayton Ashley

Developer

Kavya Sukumar

Special thanks

Cherisse Datu

Jon Douglas

Kelli Dunlap

Amy Eisman

Allegra Frank

Scott Gamble

Lindsay Grace

Alex Highsmith

Steven Leon

Tara Long

Michael McWhertor

James Mielke

Joy Mielke

Hiroko Minamoto

James Mountain

Ashley Oh

Jeff Ramos

Joyce Rice

Jeffrey Rutenbeck

Kelsey Scherer

Nancy Seay

Additional photography credits

Chris Ansell (Ansell)

Toby Canham/Getty Images (Harrison)

William Chen (Chen)

Electronic Arts (Riccitiello)

Rex Ishibashi (Ishibashi)

Robert Schlesinger/Picture Alliance (Boesky)

for DLD16 Conference via Creative Commons

Darren Smith (Smith)

Wearality (Jones)

A Vox Media Storytelling Studio collaboration