the UI. Doubling the resolution of the
Final Fantasy finger icon was actually
a pretty cool thing to work on. It’s
literally iconic. There were no fancy
up-resing
algorithms to use
back then so I was
basically filling in
a ton of pixels by
hand. You could
imagine it wasn’t
all that creatively
challenging and
not the best use of
my skillset as a 3D artist.”
Greenberg also worked on Final
Fantasy VII’s FMVs, which were
compressed for the PC release rather
than improved. “Unfortunately we
didn’t have access to any of the
higher resolution renders, and they
wouldn’t provide the original assets
to re-render, so sadly I had to
compress most of the FMVs from
320x240 versions.
“Making them fit in the disc space
required and playback properly was
quite a challenge. In the end, I don’t
think they looked as good as they
could have. If only Sqaure had been
able to provide higher resolution
frames. We had the same issue with
many of the backgrounds. These
were simply too dense to double
resolution and touch up by hand so
most of them I think were the direct
PS1 versions.”
COST OF BUSINESS
In 1998, you couldn’t do the kind of
3D graphics work that went into
Final Fantasy VII on a normal PC.
Greenberg had a $30,000 Silicon
Graphics workstation on his desk
“with probably Softimage and
Nichimen Graphics software on it to
do the low-poly modelling” he never
ended up actually working on. But he
ABOVELEFT:Some
(OK,a lot)ofthe
minigamesweren’tall
thatgood.
BELOW:The
resolutionofthe
cutscenescouldn’t
beimproved.FIXED SOMEBLATANT
MISTRANLASTIONS
LIKE “THISGUY
ARESICK”did put the hardware to use once. As
a big chocobo fan, he created a new
Squaresoft logo cinematic for the PC
version. That’s one bit of Final
Fantasy VII’s
history we can
definitively put a
name to.
The rest of
Greenberg’s
graphics work
was done on a
typical PC with
Photoshop.
Given the timeframe of the project,
I’d guess an early Pentium II system
with a CPU in the 300 MHz range.
Greenberg remembers that
compressing the FMVs took an
excruciating amount of time, and anyissues meant “hours and hours” were
being flushed down the drain.
I asked Greenberg about some of
the differences between PlayStation
and PC, like some objects strangely
being larger or smaller. He said that,
at least on the art side, they were
likely mistakes that never got caught
in testing. The triangles used to point
to exit points on the pre-rendered
backgrounds, for example, are
smaller in the PC version, perhaps
due to the doubled resolution. That’s
“probably an asset that I missed,” said
Greenberg. “I probably should have
up-resed those, but my guess is that
they look OK at original size so no
one asked for that.”
Both Fong and Greenberg
remembered the challenges that
came with testing FFVII’s PC port.
With translators on the team, the PC
version benefitted from some
cleaned-up English, which fixed
some blatant mistranslations like
“This guy are sick.” It also amusingly
introduced some new errors, but
Fong and Greenberg recalled more
pressing issues.
“We had a dedicated QA team
on-site helping us test the game as
well as do compatibility testing. PC
compatibility is vastly better
nowadays than what it was back
then!” wrote Fong. “They had a guy
whose job it was to essentially
speed-run through the game, creating
save games which were then used by
the other QA members to hammer
through each section of the game.
“I recall one bug that occurred
intermittently was a crash at the startFinal Fantasy VII
FEATURE