has been so long that I don’t have any
memory of it.” Defeat.
GAME OVER
That’s where the story ends for Final
Fantasy VII, though I did ask Fong if
he knew why Square stopped porting
the Final Fantasy games to PC after
finishing FFVIII. “I recall Square
decided to pull all development back
to Japan shortly
after FFVIII
shipped, but I’m
not sure why they
decided not to
port FFIX. If I
had to guess, I
imagine it was a
business decision
based on what
they projected the endeavour would
cost versus the potential return in
sales,” he wrote. “FFX was the first
on PS2 so I’d imagine they had their
hands full just developing the game
for the new platform, let alone worry
about porting it to PC.”
There’s precious little history
around the PC versions of these
Final Fantasy VIII floating around on
a CD, somewhere deep in the bowels
of Square, assuming it wasn’t tossed
out in the trash.
“We did play a prank on one of
the FFVIII producers. We edited the
intro logo FMV, which started
normally but after a few seconds it
would briefly flash an awkward
picture of him (let’s leave it at that)
and the frequency would slowly
increase until it completely replaced
the logo. We put it on a set of discs
marked as ‘Release Candidate.’ Of
course QA was in on this and they
did have the real Release Candidate
discs on hand as well. And no, it
never made it out to the wild!”“IT HASBEENSO
LONG THATI DON’T
HAVE ANYMEMORY
OFIT”TOP: The cool,
doomed, horrible city
of Midgar.
ABOVE: That face
when you’re about to
summon Bahamut
ZERO at someone.games, and that’s a shame – they’re
two of the first 3D Japanese games to
make the jump from console to PC.
That history deserves to be
documented. What was a simple
programming task in 1998 is now a
mystery we may never know the
answer to, because no one thought to
ask. And this is for Final Fantasy VII,
one of the most beloved games ever
made. Few games
have had 30,000
word oral
histories written
about them, and
we still don’t
know the full
story behind the
damn mouths.
What other
fascinating bits of history have
already been forgotten? (If you
worked on either port and have
stories to tell, or know why everyone
in FFVII has an O face, hit me up!)
And according to Jay Fong, while
the developers were forbidden from
adding easter eggs to the PC ports,
there may be a unique version of