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Final Fantasy 7 - An Oral History [Polygon]

C

Cheddahz

Banned
Polygon Article

1qjo7.jpg


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.

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.
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M

mattp

Member
posted this in the other thread about the amano video, but matt leone is the best features writer.

this is so great
 
G

Gai Murakumo

Member
Will read in full later but just skimming through the article that is one comprehensive write up. Good on the writer for creating such an extensive piece.
 
E

EmCeeGramr

Member
One interesting thing in here is that they basically say that it was more about the N64's performance capabilities being unable to handle the game than storage space, though the storage space was a concern.
 
B

bigkrev

Member
32 thousand words!

That's like 1/2 of the Great Gatsby.

I have a lot of issues with Polygon and some of the people they employee, but I respect them for being one of the only places that would run an article like this. I can't fathom how much time this took to put together.
 
G

Geek

Ninny Prancer
I'm biased but this story is so fucking good. I couldn't believe how much Square spent on SGI machines.

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 computers.

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. ...
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bigkrev said:
I can't fathom how much time this took to put together.
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It took about two years.
 
R

Rad-

Member
Damn good read so far.

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.
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Never knew FF7 had moneyhats involved.

What I heard was Nintendo said, ”If you're leaving us, never come back."
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Salty af.

Final Fantasy 7 came very quickly; the development period was a little more than a year. That was very unusual at the time.
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WTF???
 
K

Koozek

Member
Lol, was just about to make the thread, but obviously haven't read it fully yet. Seems like an amazing read, whew. I love features like this. Mad props to the author.
 
T

TheJollyCorner

Member
Only a fraction of the way through, but holy shit this is fascinating.
There's a lot of stuff that even in 20 years I've never heard about. I mean, all the details on the SGI presentation alone is amazing.

Wonderful stuff right here.
 
G

Glassboy

Member
Yeah, I just got to pt. 2 and this is one of the best write-ups about the making of a game that I have ever read. Thank you Matt Leone and Polygon. It would also be cool to do a feature on FF7R when that is finished to see how that project started.
 
E

EmCeeGramr

Member
Tetsuya Nomura

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

No way! I wrote that? Where?


Tetsuya Nomura

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


Yoshinori Kitase

Really? Wait, I'm starting to remember ...


Tetsuya Nomura

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.
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Can you imagine if this happened.
 
G

Guess Who

Banned
I don't even care about Final Fantasy VII and this article is god damned phenomenal. It's so rare to see any kind of extensive interviews with Japanese developers about the development process, especially in English, with this many people, at this level of detail. It must have been a Herculean effort to get this article made.
 
F

firelogic

Member
I love reading about the goings-on behind the scenes in the gaming and movie industries. I always wonder why there isn't more content like this being created. Even just "making-of" featurettes for games are far and few between. I get that there may be legal reasons/political reasons why more in-depth histories aren't possible but a safer making-of thing would still be great. Like the ones included in some of the God of War, Uncharted, Last of Us, and MGS games.

It's crazy that Square couldn't even be in the same room with Nintendo years after FF7. I suppose that's the kind of relationship Sony had with Nintendo as well, although it ended up working out better for Sony when the Nintendo partnership fell through.
 
LordKasual

LordKasual

Banned
EmCeeGramr said:
Can you imagine if this happened.
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could explain why the 2-front safer sephiroth battle was so whack lol

I can't imagine it would have made this game any less amazing, though. Would have just made the compilation titles much harder to deal with.

Which is fine by me. Damn you Nomura!!!
 
LordKasual

LordKasual

Banned
I also hope this read will stop some people from praising/condemning individuals in the company for how things turn out. Nothing about this process is solo work.

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.
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This makes alot of sense. Behemoth has been the go-to advertisement enemy for both XIII and XV, we've seen alot of that enemy floating around.
 
L

LordOfLore

Banned
LordKasual said:
I also hope this read will stop some people from praising/condemning individuals in the company for how things turn out. Nothing about this process is solo work.



This makes alot of sense. Behemoth has been the go-to advertisement enemy for both XIII and XV, we've seen alot of that enemy floating around.
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Yeah, the design is also easy to change depending on the setting and locations. I can't think of a bad Behemoth in any of the games. Even the chibi one in WoFF is good.
 
I

Infest

Member
Great article, amazing work!

I hope we get a similar in depth article about the development of XV in 20 years. :x
 
V

ViciousDS

Banned
I've never even seen that prototype FF7 SNES screenshot......holy shit is that cool.


Definitely going to read this after work
 
Pejo

Pejo

Member
I swore to not give Polygon more clicks, but this sounds like a quality piece. Bookmarking for reading at home.
 
D

DKHF

Member
I said it in the Amano video thread but this is an amazing read. Thank you Leone (if you're reading this) and Polygon for putting it together.

firelogic said:
I love reading about the goings-on behind the scenes in the gaming and movie industries. I always wonder why there isn't more content like this being created. Even just "making-of" featurettes for games are far and few between. I get that there may be legal reasons/political reasons why more in-depth histories aren't possible but a safer making-of thing would still be great. Like the ones included in some of the God of War, Uncharted, Last of Us, and MGS games.

It's crazy that Square couldn't even be in the same room with Nintendo years after FF7. I suppose that's the kind of relationship Sony had with Nintendo as well, although it ended up working out better for Sony when the Nintendo partnership fell through.
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Probably because it takes a huge amount of work and doesn't necessarily appeal to a large enough audience to justify the amount of work required to put these together. IIRC Colin Moriarty has said before when he wrote "history of" articles at IGN that was an issue, could be misremembering him saying that though.
 
ethomaz

ethomaz

Banned
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.
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Good old Square... WTF happened??? :(
 
L

Lynx_7

Member
This is a tremendous article. Really good stuff that I wish we had more of in general. I think Square is currently doing alright all things considered but I would be lying if I said I don't miss this ambitious and daring Square of old.
 
J

Joqu

Member
I'm not done reading this yet, but yes, what an amazing article. Props to Matt Leone, and I hope Polygon puts of more of these quality pieces.
 
F

firelogic

Member
DKHF said:
I said it in the Amano video thread but this is an amazing read. Thank you Leone (if you're reading this) and Polygon for putting it together.


Probably because it takes a huge amount of work and doesn't necessarily appeal to a large enough audience to justify the amount of work required to put these together. IIRC Colin Moriarty has said before when he wrote "history of" articles at IGN that was an issue, could be misremembering him saying that though.
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I keep forgetting that not everyone is like me, lol. You're right though. It's probably not worth the effort based on the limited audience that likes this kind of thing. I did read Colin's history of Naughty Dog and thought it was great.
 
P

Phatcorns

Member
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.
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Man, that is so interesting. I didn't know that it wasn't just space being an issue, but the actual raw graphics processing wasn't right for what they wanted to do.
 
ethomaz

ethomaz

Banned
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.”
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I don't think Nintendo policy changed at all even after 20 years.
 
T

Tampler

Member
Still going through it, but yeah, this article really is amazing. I'm finding the whole Square - Nintendo relationship breakdown to be especially fascinating, especially this quote:

What I heard was Nintendo said, “If you’re leaving us, never come back.”
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Really wish Polygon would do more of these, although from Leone's twitter, this toke quite sometime to get together, which is understandable.
 
Feeroper

Feeroper

Member
Holy crap this article is amazing! I would love to see more stuff like this as others had noted.

I'm currently finishing up the book Console Wars and this goes so great with that read. So much insight into some great videogame memories from years past.

I would love to see an in depth behind the scenes look at Square from beginning to present, to go beyond FF7 here and into their current state.
 
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