The history of the creation of Final Fantasy VII

Having decided on their decision to leave Nintendo, Square quickly began implementing Final Fantasy 7 on the PlayStation. The company hired a large team of 3D specialists and artists, acquired hundreds of Silicon Graphics workstations. According to many employees, such financial support allowed them to overtake competitors who developed the first 3D games.

Meanwhile, Square has invested most of its resources in creating the artwork, music, and plot of the game. She experimented with ways of presenting stories through polygonal characters and CG-videos. In addition, the company spent on opening a western sales and marketing office in the United States to increase the popularity of the game in those countries where this series has “not taken off”.


Over time, Square’s main office moved from building to building. Immediately after starting work on Final Fantasy 7, the company moved to Arco Tower in Meguro. This complex could accommodate the additional staff Square needed to create the game. | Photographer: Irwin Wong
')

Square seriously spent on the development of Final Fantasy 7

Yoshihiro Maruyama (Yoshihiro Maruyama), Executive Vice President, Square US: Final Fantasy 7 came out very quickly: the development period took a little over a year. At that time it was very unusual. To reduce the development cycle, the company has invested large sums in technology. Suddenly, the team has grown from 30-40 people to about 150.

Keith Boesky, President of Eidos (1997-1999): 150 people worked on the game, this is a huge amount. At that time, 20 people usually participated in game development.

[Note: In some memories the numbers are different. In an interview, director Yosinori Kitase said that 60 people participated in the development of Final Fantasy 6 . In the 1997 issue of the Japanese magazine Weekly Famitsu, it is written that 200 people worked on Square in FF7. Final Fantasy 6 credits include 65 names, 16 of which are noted in the “Special Thanks” section. Final Fantasy 7 credits list more than 350 names, of which more than 200 belong to outsourcing partners and foreign offices.]

Junichi Yanagihara, Executive Vice President, Square USA: I, Hashimoto-san and Kajitani-san were friends. We had to travel the world and hire people.
Shinichiro Kajitani, Vice President, Square USA: Yes, I participated in the recruiting process. It was not so difficult, because starting around 1992-93, we saw what the industry was headed for and decided to focus on 3D graphics. At that time there were the Nikkei CG and Pixel magazines, and we found about 100 people through them. Then we began to travel around the world and communicate with them. In one of the trips we got to Skywalker ranch . We did not communicate with George Lucas, just saw him from afar. At that time only 10 Japanese worked in his film studio, but we came and talked to them all.

Hiroshi Kawai, character programmer, Square Japan: Do you know the Japanese company Recruit? It is quite large and publishes various magazines, but one of the most important journals was something like the “help needed” heading. [Like the newspaper ad section], but more peculiar. They conducted detailed interviews with employees of various companies to show [what working in them is like]. Companies vied for the right to appear in this magazine. Suddenly [Square sent me a copy of the journal], I think, because I was one of the few Japanese lecturers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Shinichiro Kajitani, Vice President, Square USA: Square has always taken the view that it is better to invest 100% in one thing. So when, for example, Sega bought a computer for $ 10,000, Square bought a computer for $ 100,000. And when it came to hiring designers and programmers, they said, "Well, I would rather work on a computer for $ 100,000."


Hiroshi Kawai (Hiroshi Kawai), character programmer, Square Japan: The company environment was very comfortable for developers. We could do what was needed because the company was financially healthy.

Yoshitaka Amano, freelance illustrator: I felt that the budget was getting bigger and the scale was also increasing. The game now was not like homemade crafts; it was felt that it would be sold worldwide, would become more global and important. But in fact, I was not paid much more.

Hiroshi Kawai, character programmer, Square Japan: We were given tremendous support to speed up the development environment so that we could work effectively. Every game designer had SGI and a PC on his desk. [Square] spent a lot of money on infrastructure. And I know that Hashimoto-san was provided with great resources to get the best 3D artists.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto, Supervisor, CG Square Japan; CTO and Senior Vice President, Square USA: At that time, one workstation cost $ 70,000. First, when we were working on a demo for Siggraph, we ordered four cars. We were a small customer. When we went to Final Fantasy 7 , we asked for a 200 car quotation. Suppliers were surprised. "What?!"

Tomoyuki Takechi, President and CEO Square: We spent about 40 million dollars [in 2017, taking into account inflation, it is 61 million] to develop the game. Probably 10 million we spent only on computers.
Shinichiro Kajitani, Vice President, Square USA: At that time I was the head of the system administrators, so I planned and purchased all the equipment. [Within two years] I signed approximately $ 38 million worth of checks for Silicon Graphics. I bought more than 200 Indigo2 desktops, Onyx and Challenge rendering servers and other machines.

During the development of Final Fantasy 7, we purchased 200-250 Indigo2 worth 70,000 each. Onyx server cost about 1 million. Server Challenge cost about 500 thousand. That is, we spent about 17 million on SGI equipment. ... And software, we paid Alias ​​about 2 million yen for each of the 250 licenses, totaling about $ 4 million. So, if you subtract salaries, we spent about 21 million on graphics hardware and software. Approximately 90% was used for Final Fantasy 7 , but we used them in other projects.

Even today I am surprised that at that time, the equipment for the development of the PlayStation, which cost $ 20,000 apiece, simply lay in cardboard boxes in the corridor, and almost anyone could enter from the street and drag it off. And there were SGI cars nearby, and literally everyone could come in and pick them up. We had almost no security.


For the release of Final Fantasy 7 on PlayStation, Square generously poured in resources: hired programmers through magazines (not like the one shown above, it came out several years later) and created its own approach to the artistic style, music and other internal aspects of the game. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Square actively promoted the creation of the game.

At the beginning of 1996, the FF7 team already had most of the necessary equipment and personnel, just less than a year to complete the game. Due to the short development cycle, the visual component could remain on the cutting edge of the progress of early 3D games. This meant that the team had to work fast.

The team was trained in the process of work: from setting up a chain of tools to studying equipment and low-level programming.

Hiroki Chiba, organizer, Square Japan: It was the first 3D game in the series, so everything was new and difficult.
Tatsuya Yoshinari, Square Japan Programmer: The transition from 2D to 3D was a rather complex experience. When I studied at the institute, I did not go into the study of technical subjects and all that much, and I thought that I would create games ... But then I went to 3D graphics and realized that my knowledge of mathematics is not enough. I was very angry with myself for not studying mathematics at the institute ... I think at that time many programmers were in a similar position.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto, Supervisor, CG Square Japan; technical director and chief vice president, Square USA: The main difficulty was in-game aspects and a small amount of memory. For the technical demo at Siggraph, a very powerful SGI workstation was used. She had 256 megabytes of memory and another 256 megabytes of texture memory. In 1996 it was a lot. Do you know how much memory in PlayStation 1? Two megabytes. Only 2 megabytes are available for system memory and another 500 kilobytes for texture memory. It is too little. The problem was with the data movement. These animations were so voluminous that we had to think about how to squeeze them.

Hiroshi Kawai (Hiroshi Kawai), character programmer, Square Japan: We needed to effectively calculate which of these character 3D animations are needed at a particular level so that the download does not take too long. I remember how I was given the task with the condition that all the characters of Final Fantasy 7 for the world maps - the main and side characters - should be animated at 60 frames per second, standing next to each other on the screen ... I managed to achieve this with the help of optimizations, which Sony reluctantly added specifically for us. Their original development tools were designed to allow developers to work with the support of the [PlayStation] API, and the changes made inside should not affect them. But we have reached the point where we needed to squeeze more resources from the hardware. Therefore, one of our developers disassembled their code and found out which hardware code instructions can be used to optimize certain calculations.

At first, Sony didn’t really want us to access the hardware, because any future hardware changes would affect the functions we depended on. Fortunately, in the end they gave way, and, in turn, improved our internal API so that it was available to all PlayStation game developers.

Kazuyuki Hashimoto, Supervisor, CG Square Japan; technical director and chief vice president of Square USA: I remember how I met with lead programmer Narita-san, trying to get the characters to walk on a 3D surface. When he solved the problem, everyone was very pleased. Unforgettable event.

Hiroshi Kawai (Hiroshi Kawai), character programmer, Square Japan: The most important thing that I remember, and perhaps this was first introduced only in Final Fantasy 7 - 3D synchronization with FMV in real time. Remember the first scene in which the camera approaches the train, and then Cloud (Cloud) jumps out of it? We needed to render in real time two security guards standing on the platform. I remember that in theory everything had to work, we did all the necessary calculations. But, as you probably know, the PlayStation did not have the accuracy of powerful SGI computers to provide the desired performance. Therefore, we needed to tamper with the numerical values ​​in order to approximate what was performed on SGI. And that moment of the first scene, when the camera approaches, was not a complete FMV. It was a very simple, rendered 3D background. But at that moment the synchronization of the 3D characters and FMV looked very cool.

Frank Hom, production assistant, Eidos (1995-2001): [The game] was very beautiful. She was ahead of her time. Then there was nowhere such a merger of 2D and 3D, transitions from game art to CGI and back to the game. It seemed amazing to me. The gameplay was smooth and continuous. I think that was the beauty of Final Fantasy 7 . The player was constantly immersed in the game.

Motonori Sakakibara, movie director, Square: Every day we saw progress and were amazed at the results. The project lasted only one year, but the energy level was very high. I have never seen such a team before.
Tatsuya Yoshinari, Square Japan Programmer: One of the most important factors was everyone’s high motivation. Many worked on the game 24 hours a day, and no one burned out, because everyone was motivated and worked with pleasure. Square has invested heavily in technology and human reserves, but motivation has also been a very important factor. We were young and could work for a long time and without interruptions.

Most of the time I was thinking about the game. I woke up in the morning and immediately started thinking about the game, started working, worked on the game until late at night with my colleagues in Square, and then in the evening on the train I was returning home, thinking about the game. Took a shower, thinking about the game, went to bed, and the next day everything was repeated. I did not feel that I went to work to do my duty, I liked to do it.


In mid-2015, the Tokyo National Art Center held an exhibition entitled Manga, Anime, Games from Japan, which featured Cloud's sword from Final Fantasy 7 and frame-based game graphics. | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Artist Tetsuya Nomura is on the rise

Continuing to work on technology, Square still had to decide which style to choose for the first big 3D project - Final Fantasy 7 .

Art director Yusuke Naora took over the general style of the game. But the character designer Tetsuya Nomura (Tetsuya Nomura) has become a star for many fans thanks to such characters as Cloud, whose “prickly” hairstyle well approached the 3D engine of the game. All the FF7 characters have moved away from the bizarre appearance that was familiar to Final Fantasy 2D games. According to many, this made them more attractive to Western fans.

In the process of developing the game, Nomura not only painted all the characters, but also fully took over the creative part of the project, contributing to the history and design of the game along with Sakaguchi and Kitase.

After the release of FF7, Nomura became the initiator of the Kingdom Hearts franchise and became one of the most famous employees of Square.

Nobuo Uematsu (Nobuo Uematsu), composer, Square Japan: Nomura-san worked on this series of games [before Final Fantasy 7 ] for a long time, but it seems to me that his style was truly embodied in the era of PlayStation, because more. I think he was very well influenced by the transition from the Final Fantasy series to the PlayStation.

Motonori Sakakibara, movie director, Square: Nomura-san was a great 2D artist, but his characters were much better at 3D. He spent a lot of time making the characters in the game look exactly like his original designs. And this was one of the biggest secrets of character creation for Final Fantasy 7 .

Tetsuya Nomura, visual character and battle director, Square Japan: I’ve been involved in the series since Final Fantasy 5 . And while working on Final Fantasy 5 and 6 , I always discussed plans and shared ideas with Kitase-san. But in the seventh part, I took the lead and began to make proposals and more clearly talk about what I want to see in the game.

Motonori Sakakibara Motonori Sakakibara, Movie Director, Square: Nomura-san is crazy. [laughs] His standards are incredibly high. He was always worried, for example, about the eyes of the characters, their size and shape, the thickness of the eyelids. He could spend a lot of time over a slight bend in his eye. I do not remember him approving something the first time.

Tetsuya Nomura (Tetsuya Nomura), visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: I am inconsistent, so I rarely work on only one aspect and do not focus only on it. For example, if I draw, I do not work on only one element. I make four or five, and switch between them. Or if I'm working on a design document for the game and feel that I need to change the pace, then I start drawing. Or, if I need to draw, I can work on different projects to change the mood and refresh my impressions. That's how I prioritize. But if the terms of work are under pressure, then I, of course, do it first.

Hiroshi Kawai, character programmer, Square Japan: This may sound condescending, but he seemed very immersed in the work during Final Fantasy 7 . I do not know whether the seventh part, or Final Fantasy 8 has changed it. At that moment he became a completely different person. The authority gained in Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 , made it almost inviolable, put it almost on par with Sakaguchi-san. It was impossible to argue with him.

Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: Since I started working at Square, my position in the company has changed dramatically. When I started, I was at the end of the corporate chain, and now I'm at the level at which strategic decisions are made. In this sense, everything has changed, but I always wanted to look at the game from the player’s point of view. Someone may not agree with me, but I see my role as an observer through the eyes of the player. And in this respect, it seems to me, almost nothing has changed.


Tetsuya Nomura influenced many aspects of the development of Final Fantasy 7, but fans are better known as a character designer. It was he who developed all the characters, including the main one - Cloud (left) and the villain Sephiroth (right). | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Square kills one of the main characters of the game

In early 1997, Square completed work on the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 7 . The team helped implement Sakaguchi’s ideas by creating a game with best-in-class graphics and a variety of content, which helped advance the PlayStation console.

But the team had a secret. Toward the end of the first disc of the game, the villain Sephiroth stabs in the back of one of the main characters of the game, Iris Gainsborough (Aerith Gainsborough), and kills her.

Today, many say that this scene with low-detailed characters and twitching animation looks almost comically primitive. But at the time, she stood out as one of the most emotionally intense moments created by the gaming industry. This moment was remembered by fans for many years. Many players even cried.

Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: Even after a few people came to me and asked: "Did you kill Iris ?!"
Yosinori Kitase (Yoshinori Kitase), director of Square Japan: [Nomura:] Do you blame me for this? [laughs]
Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: Well, maybe I killed Iris. But if I didn’t stop you, in the second half of the game you planned to kill everyone except the last three characters the player chooses!

Yosinori Kitase, Director, Square Japan: It Can't Be! I wrote this? Where?
Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: In the scene where they jump with parachutes in Midgar. You wanted to kill everyone there!
Yosinori Kitase, Director, Square Japan: Is it? Wait, yes, I'm starting to remember ...
Tetsuya Nomura, character and battle director, Square Japan: Remember? You and [scriptwriter] Nojima-san were delighted with this. And only I said: “For no reason!” And stopped you. You wanted to kill everyone except the last three characters that the player chooses for the end of the game.

Katsushige Nojima (Kazushige Nojima), screenwriter Square Japan: Obviously, I am a screenwriter and wrote a piece where Iris dies. But we discussed this decision with all the authorities. We talked a lot about how the story should turn.
Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: The theme of Final Fantasy 7 was life, and we donated Iris to add weight and depth to this topic. Her death is a tragedy, but if we suddenly killed everyone else after that, we would devalue the significance of her death.

Katsushige Nojima (Kazushige Nojima), screenwriter Square Japan: At that time, changing the script on the fly was much easier. Therefore, every day we returned to the discussion of different approaches.
Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: Much later after we decided to kill Iris and the development was well advanced, I went to the Weematsu-san room. We just talked and discussed different things. One day, closer to the end of the development, I went to him and asked: "Do you think that the murder of Iris is the right choice?"
Yosinori Kitase, director of Square Japan: Really?
Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: He said yes, he is sure of that.
Yosinori Kitase, director of Square Japan: Ha, I was expecting something else.
Tetsuya Nomura, character and battle director, Square Japan: After that, I sighed calmly.
Nobuo Uematsu (composer) Square Japan: When I played the game, I was very surprised that she died so early. Everyone probably thought that she would become one of the most popular characters, but she just died. Perhaps that is why she was so remembered.

Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan:When a video game character dies, no one thinks it's sad. It's just the characters of the game, you can simply click on the Reset and replay, or there is always the opportunity to somehow revive them. I felt that their lives do not have much weight. The FF7 theme is life, and I thought that we should try to reflect a character who really dies in the name of good and will never return. For death to find a response, it must be an important character. Therefore, we decided that the killing of the heroine would allow players to reflect on this topic more deeply.

Nobuo Uematsu, Square Japan composer:When I was writing [the music of the moment of death Iris], I did not think about her death, but I felt that she was not a very happy character. She was innocent and pure, but her life was tragic. I realized that it would be an important composition.

If I knew that the scene made people cry, I could come up with something completely different that made me cry. But I composed a sad and beautiful melody, and maybe it worked well precisely because usually in tragic events completely different music is expected. When something is missing, people complement it with their imagination. Therefore, although the music does not fully express the feeling of this moment, the players mentally filled in this lack. It seems to me.

Tetsuya Nomura, visual director of characters and battles, Square Japan: [I did not set out to make people cry in this scene.] Rather, I wanted people to understand what pain means and feel a sense of loss.


Almost 20 years after the release of Final Fantasy 7, Square Enix still asks the media not to use Iris' death scene in articles, in order not to spoil the impressions of the players. We didn’t want this either, but you can see it here if you wish . | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

Square seeks western market

Knowing the achievements of the previous parts of Final Fantasy , the Square leadership in Japan did not doubt the good local sales of FF7 . And so it happened, in the first week they sold more than two million copies, and gradually the volume increased to four million.

North America and Europe were a completely different matter. At that time, Japanese role-playing games became iconic among a small audience in the West, and the Final Fantasy series tried to expand its popularity.

Therefore, with the release of Final Fantasy 7in Western markets, Square closed its sales and marketing office in Washington and hired two newcomers to the gaming industry to open a new office in Costa Mesa (California), giving the company a new start and a series of games in the West.

Yoshihiro Maruyama (Yoshihiro Maruyama), executive vice president of Square US: At that time, Squaresoft generated more than 95% of its revenue in the Japanese market. The remaining 5% was earned mainly in the United States, perhaps one or two percent in the European market. But the main income received in the Japanese market. Therefore, the company wanted to expand its business outside of Japan. That's how they hired me.

Jun Iwasaki, vice president of marketing for Square US:I knew [FF7 Producer-Publisher] Shinji Hashimoto from Square at a Tokyo-based advertising agency. Once he called me and said: "We have a big project coming out, Final Fantasy 7 , and we want to sell it all over the world." Then he said that he was looking for someone who could do marketing for the American market. I asked, "What? American market? ”Because I didn't speak English very well. [laughs] But he answered: “It doesn’t matter. If you're interested, call me. ”

Yoshihiro Maruyama, executive vice president of Square US: My first task was to move the Squaresoft office from Redmond, WA, to California.
Jun Iwasaki, vice president of marketing for Square US:Time was chosen well, Square just passed from Nintendo to Sony. The Square office used to be located in Seattle, because the Nintendo office was nearby. But Sakaguchi-san decided to close his Seattle office.

Yoshihiro Maruyama (Yoshihiro Maruyama), executive vice president of Square US: Sakaguchi-san opened a development studio [then called Square LA, and now Square USA] in Marina del Rey [to work on other projects], so we opened office [nearby] in Costa Mesa.

Jun Iwasaki, vice president of marketing for Square US: San Francisco would be the logical choice, because Sony was there. But at that time we were in Los Angeles and we had a small office inside Sony's American center, because Final Fantasy 7was considered a top level product. We controlled the marketing, but asked Sony to get involved in budget, publishing and all that.

Final Fantasy 7 becomes an international hit

Despite the “downloading” tens of millions of dollars in marketing to Final Fantasy 7 , some in Square were not sure that the game could win a wide audience in the United States and Europe, given the limited popularity of the previous installments. The Japanese RPGs never became hits in the West, and some thought the situation would not change due to the slower pace of the JRPG compared to Western action games.

Iwasaki, Maruyama and Square’s new sales and marketing office took this as a challenge.

Jun Iwasaki, vice president of marketing for Square US: When I came to Square, Sakaguchi-san said: “Your goal is to sell a million copies of Final Fantasy 7in USA". Because at that time, Sony failed to achieve a million sales from any game. Million has become something of a cherished number.

Tomoyuki Takechi, President and CEO Square: When Final Fantasy was released on Nintendo platforms, the series was not very popular outside of Japan. In America, sold only 400 thousand copies of Final Fantasy 6 .

I was quite sure that we could sell 2.5-3 million copies of [Final Fantasy 7] in Japan, so I was calm, there was no big risk. But I also thought that it could be sold all over the world, and I felt at risk. Later, I was able to sign an agreement with Sony to release the game in the US under the Sony brand, so I thought, “Oh, well, maybe you can sell a million outside of Japan.”

Seth Luisi, Assistant Producer, Sony Computer Entertainment America: Actually, much depended on the question, how can we put JRPG on the North American market and achieve sales like a big AAA game? At that time, those who had worked on Japanese RPGs before had seen a very narrow niche market in North America. They could not sell more than 30-50 thousand copies. Therefore, for Final Fantasy, our big goal was to reverse this situation. To declare her as a big game, create the right advertising for her and make a good leap so that she gets all the attention she deserves and is well received in the North American market.

Kyoko Higo, Marketing Assistant, Square US: It was rumored in the office that if we did not succeedFF7 , then we will close. Therefore, we perceived it as if our work was at stake, despite the lengthy contract for the publication of six games. [laughs]

I think the most difficult task was that despite the beautiful graphics, the players were familiar with the previous parts of Final Fantasy , and we needed to explain the change in visual style. She is awesome, best game, etc. But we asked the question: “How do we convey this?”

Jun Iwasaki, vice president of marketing for Square US: We asked Sony not to mention the word “RPG” because people considered role-playing games too long and monotonous. It was a bad word in terms of marketing.
Chris Ansell, Project Manager, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe:Even the entire turn-based mechanics of the game caused the majority of European players questions: “What is this? Why is she so slow? ”Therefore, we constantly explained to people:“ It will be very fast and as tense as real-time fighting games, but you need to get used to it. Give the game a chance to show yourself and teach you the combat system. ”

Kyoko Higo, Marketing Assistant, Square US: Among the games of the time that were released during the holidays, she was one of the most beautiful and well-represented, and many would agree with me. Photos in magazines could not fully reflect its attractiveness. Therefore, we had no options, except to display ads on TV. And Sony was ready [to do commercials].

Jun Iwasaki, vice president of marketing for Square US:Sony has taken up PR and other aspects. From the point of view of creative expression, we had the right to approve all advertising. I always sent it to Sakaguchi-san, because the characters were like his children. [Sony's vice president of marketing] Andrew House has always complained about this. [laughs]

David Bamberger, General Product Manager, Sony Computer Entertainment America: We had a window in three months. With wholesale orders, if released in September, you will receive the second order in December, and in the first quarter of next year the holidays will end.

Kyoko Higo, Marketing Assistant, Square US:It seems then we received orders every week. And the numbers are constantly growing. Then they started to turn the ads, and everything happened at the same time. I went shopping and saw a large figure of Cloud in the window of the local Electronics Boutique. Many of our testers were students at [University of California, Irvine] because he was 10-15 minutes away from the office. I remember when I went into the kitchen or dining room, and they told how their study friends were delighted and they were talking about the game. There were such small moments.

An important moment came when the game was released and appeared on many covers. I don’t remember how many covers there are, but I’m sure of it - I remember PSM, EGM. Most magazines requested covers. Then they began to exhibit as part of the office. And then, after one or two weeks of sales, we began to learn statistics. We were told that the game this year will quickly reach the level of a million sales. So it happened. We have reached this figure in less than three months.

Jun Iwasaki, vice president of marketing for Square US: I remember Andrew House calling me and saying, "You know, we sold a million." And I immediately called Takeati-san. "We have a million!" And he replied: "Oh, that's good." [laughs]
David Bamberger, General Product Manager, Sony Computer Entertainment America: I bet $ 20 with [Sony Vice President Phil Harris that] by March a million copies will be sold. And I lost.
Tomoyuki Takechi, President and CEO Square: When we found out we had reached a million sales [in the US], we went to Roppongi [Tokyo, known for its nightlife] and celebrated it. We were very pleased with the growth in sales outside Japan. We moved to Sony mainly because we wanted to create games with a lot of computer graphics and make games that are different from existing ones. Therefore, we have invested so much in Final Fantasy . And thanks to the success of Final Fantasy 7, we were able to release many more games.


Final Fantasy 7 Square Japan , . | Photographer: Irwin Wong

Kyoko Higo, Marketing Assistant, Square US: The game was released on September 7, 1997. I remember how in the first week of December I went to the office, and [Iwasaki and Maruyama] wanted to gather everyone and announce the overcoming of the one million sales barrier. It seems that Andy House sent us a few bottles of champagne. [laughs] [Iwasaki], did not know about it, and on the way to the office I bought more champagne, and this day became the happiest in the office. After such hard work, sometimes around the clock, even those who were engaged in marketing ... it was, I think, the day of our greatest pride and happiness.

Jun Iwasaki, vice president of marketing for Square US: Then Kyoko [Higo] and the team gave me a plaque. Then I cried, so I remember it. [laughs]
Kyoko Higo, Marketing Assistant, Square US: I can’t speak on behalf of the development team, but with a lot of confidence I can say that it was not just the completion of something big, big project with a lot of people, but and a breakthrough in the western market, the conquest of the western audience and fans.

Tomoyuki Takechi, President and CEO Square: As a result, we sold three million in North America and two million in Europe, that is, we did it all. FF has become a world famous series of games.

Square Enix creates remake of Final Fantasy 7

20 years after the release of Final Fantasy 7 , a lot has changed. Square became Square Enix, merging with its former rival, and acquiring independent publishers Taito and Eidos. In 2017, the company has a large list of franchises, including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. Every year she releases various Final Fantasy projects , sometimes even CG-films.

But over time, for many fans, one thing remains the same: the desire for a remake of Final Fantasy 7. Part of the 2005 PlayStation 3 technical demo, which showed what a graphically improved version of the game might be like, the idea of ​​a remake became something of a myth that fans have always hoped for. But there was never any specific information about its development.

Then, in 2015, after years of requests and rumors, Square Enix showed a trailer at Sony's E3 press conference, announcing the creation of the game, which everyone was waiting for.

The subtitle "Remake" has appeared. Some fans cried from happiness.

Announcing the remake, Square Enix also announced that Tetsuya Nomura will be the director of the game, Yosinori Kitase the producer, and Katsusige Nojima the script writer, thus uniting the three creative leaders of the original game.


At the Sony PlayStation Experience event in 2015, Final Fantasy 7 Remake producer Yosinori Kitase and director Tetsuya Nomura showed the first public shots from the game. | Photographer: Jonathan Castillo

[Prim. Trans .: The original of the article is much more in volume, I recommend reading it to fans of the series.]