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

-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.”

-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.”

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.

“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?’”

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

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.”

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.