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[LectureMaster]

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director says "basically nothing" from the original JRPG's development survived: "We're talking about the mid '90s... There's almost no documentation left"

"Game development back then was a lot more Wild West"

www.gamesradar.com

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"Game development back then was a lot more Wild West"

You may not think the '90s were a dead zone of lost records since people were publicly making things like 'Black Hole Sun' by Soundgarden, but in the world of game development, the 1990s might as well be the dawn of civilization. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi says so many of its important artifacts are gone.

We're talking about the mid '90s... There's almost no documentation left over from that period at all, practically none," Hamaguchi tells Eurogamer in a new interview. "Game development back then was a lot more Wild West – a lot of material was just not kept. Data management wasn't done to modern standards, so yeah, there's basically nothing."

That means most dev materials from the original, 1997 Final Fantasy 7 are stuffed in the back of a drawer or got slimed in a garbage chute at some point, and Hamaguchi can't freely reference them for his remake trilogy. "There are some character design sketches I think we've still got," he says, but that's about it – and that makes it harder to avoid what he's afraid of, writing fanfiction.

"What I really want to avoid here," Hamaguchi says, "is basically because I am such a big fan of the game. Because of that, what I'm not doing is trying to overwrite the original game with my own fan perspective version of it and create a new version of the game, which is essentially a fan fiction of it."

It's a good thing, then, that many members of Final Fantasy 7's 1990s development team – including director Yoshinori Kitase and artist Tetsuya Nomura – are involved with the remake's creation.

"I really am grateful about having them on hand," says Hamaguchi. "Even if there's no documentation, we can kind of get it from the horse's mouth."

 

[nial]

I want to know what is even left from the Famicom era of game development.

 

[Durin]

It is a real shame so much of that stuff is lost, gotta have at least one prepper-mentality person on dev staff.

Basically left with just the oral history from the people still alive that made it.

 

[Pejo]

"What I really want to avoid here," Hamaguchi says, "is basically because I am such a big fan of the game. Because of that, what I'm not doing is trying to overwrite the original game with my own fan perspective version of it and create a new version of the game, which is essentially a fan fiction of it."

Uhhhhh.....

He's not done a great job of sticking to his own quote.

 

[Dr Bass]

The FF7 script is the one thing that is so easy to recreate if it's "lost." Strange commentary.

 

[Loomy]

The FF7 script is the one thing that is so easy to recreate if it's "lost." Strange commentary.

Also accurate commentary. This isn't the first time someone from Square has commented on lost files from the 90s. Pretty sure they said the same thing about FF8 and FF9 when it came to upscaling them. They lost a lot of the original assets.

Could be just that Square had shit file management and archiving back in the day.

 

[March Climber]

And my hope for a Vagrant Story remaster continues to decrease.

Maybe through some small chance, the team who rebuilt FF Tactics from scratch will do the same for VS.

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

The fact that no one cared about gaming preservation is a shame. I remember when i heard that Square Enix had lost the assets for FFIX, the HD backgrounds (which they had originally)...i was sick when i saw an interview that revealed that. That's why the HD remaster is clearly upscaled lol. Imagine that game with HD backgrounds and the characters completely updated. The game could look almost current or similar to many smaller-scalled releases from smaller studios.

 

[EverydayBeast]

Saving things wasn't a priority like it is now with the cloud, terabytes and AI.

 

[Larxia]

Also accurate commentary. This isn't the first time someone from Square has commented on lost files from the 90s. Pretty sure they said the same thing about FF8 and FF9 when it came to upscaling them. They lost a lot of the original assets.

Could be just that Square had shit file management and archiving back in the day.

It even goes up to at least early ps2 era, because they also lost the source code for Kingdom Hearts 1 and had to use the public commercial version when making the remaster.

 

[DownLikeBCPowder]

"What I really want to avoid here," Hamaguchi says, "is basically because I am such a big fan of the game. Because of that, what I'm not doing is trying to overwrite the original game with my own fan perspective version of it and create a new version of the game, which is essentially a fan fiction of it."

A little late to be worried about that.

 

[Comandr]

Uhhhhh.....

He's not done a great job of sticking to his own quote.

Worst part of the fuckin' games.

Also accurate commentary. This isn't the first time someone from Square has commented on lost files from the 90s. Pretty sure they said the same thing about FF8 and FF9 when it came to upscaling them. They lost a lot of the original assets.

Could be just that Square had shit file management and archiving back in the day.

What does this even MEAN and ... Why does it matter? If amateur, unpaid modders can pull models, scripts, gameplay triggers, backgrounds, cutscenes out of games and reinject them with completely new stuff, there is no fucking excuse here.
There is literally no excuse.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

My mother misses a part of her pension from a company that she worked for in the 80s. Their paperwork just vanished.

Unimaginable in the age of the Cloud.

 

[Loomy]

What does this even MEAN

It means that the graphic and audio assets they originally created - and in some cases source code as well - were not preserved. Square straight up lost them.

There was an article from a while ago talking about how they even lost a lot of the project files from the original PC release of FF7 from the 90s. A game that was already cobbled together from files the team had to rework from an older builds of the PS1 game. So when they went in to do the remaster 10 or so years ago, Square couldn't find it, so they had to work with a retail version of the game.

Why does it matter?

It matters because when Square is working on a re-release, or re-master, they're looking to work with existing assets.

Let's take FF9 for example. That game has some of the most gorgeous 3d pre-rendered backgrounds from that era. Those are created at a very high resolution, and then scaled down to fit whatever the PS1 was rendering games at.

Square apparently decided that once they had those in the game, they weren't worth saving, so a lot of them are just gone. It matters because when you're looking to upscale the games(or anything, really), you want to start with the highest resolution assets you can find.

They even lost original cut-scenes before they were compressed to fit on CDs. Which is why even in some of the HD remasters they've put out, as soon as a pre-rendered cutscene comes on, it looks pixelated as hell.

If amateur, unpaid modders can pull models, scripts, gameplay triggers, backgrounds, cutscenes out of games and reinject them with completely new stuff, there is no fucking excuse here.
There is literally no excuse.

They're doing very different things with very different goals.

The video you shared has mods where they recreated character models and other in game assets from scratch. Some of that work included improved textures usingAI upscaling(wasn't really a thing at a consumer scale when Square did their last FF remaster). They also recreated and extended some of the static backgrounds to 16:9.

If that's what Square wanted/wants to do, that's what they would do. They've done an extreme version of that with the remake series.

Again, the reason why you want the original assets is to remaster, while preserving the original look & feel.

I hope this helps explain it.

 

[adamsapple]

Sadly a very common tale for 90s Japanese devs.

They would literally shred the documentation when a project was done.

 

[A.Romero]

Understandable. Storage space was considerably less abundant and best practice frameworks were still not widely adopted.

It's a shame but understandable.

 

[Dr Bass]

Also accurate commentary. This isn't the first time someone from Square has commented on lost files from the 90s. Pretty sure they said the same thing about FF8 and FF9 when it came to upscaling them. They lost a lot of the original assets.

Could be just that Square had shit file management and archiving back in the day.

Sure but the data is on the discs and it's possible to decompile and recover data as well. It's far from a lost cause.

And like I said the script is right there in the game. So no, it's not accurate. If you're "worried" about changing the story then … you know … play the damn game.

Sounds like straight up excuses.

 

[DreamcastSkies]

Really sad. Another case of poor preservation of video games. I understand they likely weren't thinking 30 years down the road when they were making those games, but they made history and it would have been nice if more of it had been preserved.

 

[Loomy]

Sure but the data is on the discs and it's possible to decompile and recover data as well. It's far from a lost cause.

And like I said the script is right there in the game. So no, it's not accurate. If you're "worried" about changing the story then … you know … play the damn game.

Sounds like straight up excuses.

Check out my other (long)comment. If you're looking to remaster the game, you want to work from original high resolution assets. If you grab assets from a disk, you're working with scaled down, compressed assets that you then have to reconstruct.

Is it possible? Yes. Square has done it with almost all FF Remasters they've done.

Is it ideal? Far from it.

Like someone else pointed out, Square had this issue all the way up to Kingdom Hearts 1 and Final Fantasy 10 on PS2. It's why the character models in FFX-HD Remaster look so weird. They lost the original high detail models. So they had to upscale lower detailed models and work with those.

Again, possible. But as you can see with FF10, not ideal.

 

[Loomy]

And my hope for a Vagrant Story remaster continues to decrease.

Maybe through some small chance, the team who rebuilt FF Tactics from scratch will do the same for VS.

Even that is a sad and somewhat hilarious story of Square not giving a shit about preservation at the time lol.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Square has no idea where any of the files related to Vagrant story is. If they didn't care about properly storing the KH1(Disney collab) and FF10 files, they certainly didn't give a shit about Vagrant Story. Which is a shame...

Article:

Final Fantasy fans really love Final Fantasy - so much so that they're informal stewards of the games' source codes. It's been 28 years since Final Fantasy Tactics was originally released, and in order to remake the game for Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles (out next month), the team needed to account for one massive problem: they no longer had the source code from the 1997 game.

At a panel at PAX West 2025, director Kazutoyo Maehiro explained that the reason why Square Enix no longer had the original source code for Final Fantasy Tactics boiled down to how that original source code was overwritten when the game was brought to audiences outside of Japan: "We would basically take that data from the Japanese version and overwrite the English data on it, and we wanted to do another language, we would keep just stacking on top and overwriting and overwriting," Maehiro began.

"So we kind of went on a journey to find the original version, and we were using whatever resources we had available to us, so all those different versions would be analyzing what was there to try to find what we felt was the original. On top of that, we actually had to go to different websites made by fans and look for data there, because we know you guys do such a good job of keeping all of that up to date."

Source: https://www.thepopverse.com/gaming-final-fantasy-tactics-ivalice-chronicles-source-code-lost-pax-west-2025

 

[CamHostage]

It is a real shame so much of that stuff is lost, gotta have at least one prepper-mentality person on dev staff.

Basically left with just the oral history from the people still alive that made it.

Whereas I could conceivably look up in the MGM archives what day and what time Clark Gable clocked in for his "I don't give a damn" speech.

I could pull out the master tapes of many sessions by the Beatles and remaster classics from the stems.

I could see paintings by Mary Blair used to design Its a Small World, or costumes worn by Lucielle Ball, or armature used to animate Kong.

Hell, companies like Vinegar Syndrome are digging up actual negatives to print master copies of old pornos or exploitation scuzz like Goodbye Uncle Tom, the kind of other stuff that even in its time was considered ephemeral cash-grabs.

...Obviously, not everything was saved (and there are legendary stories of regrettable disasters such as how Johnny Carson's early years were recorded over, ) but some industries found reason to value their archive, while game publishers notoriously did not.

 

[calico]

What they made so far is more like a response / pseudo-sequel to FF7 than a genuine remake, so technically true that he isn't trying to 'overwrite' it I guess.

The trilogy they are making would be (even more) nonsensical without FF7 og existing as a discrete entity for the trilogy to reference.

 

[Durin]

Whereas I could conceivably look up in the MGM archives what day and what time Clark Gable clocked in for his "I don't give a damn" speech.

I could pull out the master tapes of many sessions by the Beatles and remaster classics from the stems.

I could see paintings by Mary Blair used to design Its a Small World, or costumes worn by Lucielle Ball, or armature used to animate Kong.

Hell, companies like Vinegar Syndrome are digging up actual negatives to print master copies of old pornos or exploitation scuzz like Goodbye Uncle Tom, the kind of other stuff that even in its time was considered ephemeral cash-grabs.

...Obviously, not everything was saved (and there are legendary stories of regrettable disasters such as how Johnny Carson's early years were recorded over, ) but some industries found reason to value their archive, while game publishers notoriously did not.

Yeah, the games industry in general has been pretty bad at preserving its own history. I honestly think the mentality of games being like software where you just make the next version contributes. They also wanna sell remasters down the line for more money anyway, and I think to some publishers don't want to compete with their own beloved older games.

Some games that would be lost to time on finite physical copies only live on through emulation and piracy sites. Otherwise, organizations like Video Game History Foundation, Videogame Heritage Society, and National Videogame Museum are the best attempts we got (at least in the US).

 

[kiphalfton]

Uhhhhh.....

He's not done a great job of sticking to his own quote.

I hated the dementors in FFVII Remake.

 

[Three]

Worst part of the fuckin' games.

What does this even MEAN and ... Why does it matter? If amateur, unpaid modders can pull models, scripts, gameplay triggers, backgrounds, cutscenes out of games and reinject them with completely new stuff, there is no fucking excuse here.
There is literally no excuse.

I knew this thread would turn into stupid nagging. "Assets" are not just in game. He was talking about concept art and sketches. He even mentions this directly regarding just having some character sketches left. Turning pixelated backgrounds and blocky characters into something 3D and high poly leaves a lot of things to the imagination and you need the people involved to explain it. Anybody remember that pixel art of some wizard that people saw in 2 different ways?

 

[Hudo]

"What I really want to avoid here," Hamaguchi says, "is basically because I am such a big fan of the game. Because of that, what I'm not doing is trying to overwrite the original game with my own fan perspective version of it and create a new version of the game, which is essentially a fan fiction of it."

I love how he just fucking lies here. So far, that's exactly what he has done/they have done.

 

[DeltaPolarBear]

Basically left with just the oral history from the people still alive that made it.

That was actually WHY they decided to make the FF7 Remake; they realized that the remaining members are getting too old and that if they don't do it NOW, they would never be able to once the old guard retires.

I love how he just fucking lies here. So far, that's exactly what he has done/they have done.

They decided that the remake would break the 4th wall and be a new timeline. Not fanfiction, but your are free to dislike it. The same way i dislike Chrono Cross.

 

[Jinzo Prime]

I knew this thread would turn into stupid nagging. "Assets" are not just in game. He was talking about concept art and sketches. He even mentions this directly regarding just having some character sketches left. Turning pixelated backgrounds and blocky characters into something 3D and high poly leaves a lot of things to the imagination and you need the people involved to explain it. Anybody remember that pixel art of some wizard that people saw in 2 different ways?

I argee in principal, but FF Remake completely misses the 90s cyberpunk aesthetic that is quite apparent in any screen from the original. The devs should have studied media that was influential at the time FF7 was made, like Ghost in the Shell and Akira.

 

[MagiusNecros]

I love how he just fucking lies here. So far, that's exactly what he has done/they have done.

He is projecting big time.

Sounds to me like they burned their own books and are just winging it with IMO a rather soulless version of FF7 which should have been marketed as FF7-2.

The whole thing really has been someone's fanfic brought to life because reasons.

 

[Liopleurodon]

I can live with AI upscaled backgrounds.

 

[Ar¢tos]

That was actually WHY they decided to make the FF7 Remake; they realized that the remaining members are getting too old and that if they don't do it NOW, they would never be able to once the old guard retires.


They decided that the remake would break the 4th wall and be a new timeline. Not fanfiction, but your are free to dislike it. The same way i dislike Chrono Cross.

Isn't creating a new timeline overwritting the original game and creating a new version of the story invented by him? (making it not a remake, but a different game)

 

[YeulEmeralda]

He is projecting big time.

Sounds to me like they burned their own books and are just winging it with IMO a rather soulless version of FF7 which should have been marketed as FF7-2.

The whole thing really has been someone's fanfic brought to life because reasons.

It's not a fanfic if it is written by the people who made the original.

It's like I have to accept that the Alien prequels are canon.

 

[Hudo]

It's like I have to accept that the Alien prequels are canon.

NEVER

 

[cireza]

It's not as if the game is unbelievably complex. It is basically a corridor with drunk minigames. I doubt that so much thought was put into making it. It feels like a "what are we going to throw in this game today" kind of development. The worldmap design is so basic even FF IV on SNES is more elaborated on that part... Clearly a best effort work of moving to 3D without a budget.

 

[Mr Hyde]

I think Square has lost the source code to pretty much every PS1 game they did, that's why they haven't re-released classics such as Parasite Eve, Xenogears and Vagrant Story. They're gonna have to rebuild them from the ground up like they did with FF Tactics, Legend of Mana and Chrono Cross, among other recent PS1 remaster they put out. It's a shame, but hopefully they commit and do a good job. These games deserves to be on modern platforms.

 

[L*][*N*K]

I want to know what is even left from the Famicom era of game development.

Nintendo kept alot of their stuff, idk about the others

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

I want to know what is even left from the Famicom era of game development.

Famicom? Imagine what has been lost from the era of personal computers before the console boom.

The truth is, until video game companies learned that retro gaming could make them a dollar or two, almost all of the people who worked at them were convinced that each game was a been here, done that thing that people would consume and quickly forget. In the 80s, nobody really expected people wanting to play a Famicom game five years later, let alone forty. Tech was improving quickly and everyone was always excited about the next big thing. They'd laugh at the idea of people making pixel-based games in the 2000s - imagine going back and telling them people are still making plenty of those in the 2020s.
Heck, Nintendo went all in with rewritable disks for a while. You could erase an old game to make space for a new one. That's how one-and-done games were considered then.

 

[Hanzaki]

As a highly collector mentality person its always makes me angry/sad when I read this very 90s japanese dev thing...

 

[daninthemix]

They were livin' the dream and flying by the seat of their pants.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Famicom? Imagine what has been lost from the era of personal computers before the console boom.

The truth is, until video game companies learned that retro gaming could make them a dollar or two, almost all of the people who worked at them were convinced that each game was a been here, done that thing that people would consume and quickly forget. In the 80s, nobody really expected people wanting to play a Famicom game five years later, let alone forty. Tech was improving quickly and everyone was always excited about the next big thing. They'd laugh at the idea of people making pixel-based games in the 2000s - imagine going back and telling them people are still making plenty of those in the 2020s.
Heck, Nintendo went all in with rewritable disks for a while. You could erase an old game to make space for a new one. That's how one-and-done games were considered then.

GOG basically had to convince the industry there is money in selling old games. Before them it was just up to piracy to preserve games.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

GOG basically had to convince the industry there is money in selling old games. Before them it was just up to piracy to preserve games.

Uhm… not really? We could buy collections of old games as soon as the 32-bit era. And Nintendo did that NES classics series on the GBA.

 

[MagiusNecros]

It's not a fanfic if it is written by the people who made the original.

It's like I have to accept that the Alien prequels are canon.

Nah I just adding FF7R Trilogy to the same trash can Lightning Returns and Dirge of Cerberus is in.

 

[Boss Mog]

All these big game companies not safeguarding their old code seems crazy to me. I still have files from 25 years ago, it's not that hard to not lose them.

 

[Mr Hyde]

Nintendo kept alot of their stuff, idk about the others

I think Nintendo is the only video game company who is/was actually interested in preserving their legacy and build upon it. I bet they have the source code intact for every game they've released all the way back to early 80s, all neatly filed and easy to recover, without having to rebuild them from scratch from retail units like SE are doing.

 

[Calverz]

I'm not surprised. From what I played of the remake, it was nothing like the original.

 

[Signalis]

Doesn't mean they had to fuck it up as they have so far

 

[Boneless]

Cant wait for this remake bullshit to be over so they can finally release the proper remaster that it deserves.

 

[Signalis]

I think Nintendo is the only video game company who is/was actually interested in preserving their legacy and build upon it. I bet they have the source code intact for every game they've released all the way back to early 80s, all neatly filed and easy to recover, without having to rebuild them from scratch from retail units like SE are doing.

They used a downloaded rom of Super Mario Bros. to sell back to people on the Wii

 

[Signalis]

Cant wait for this remake bullshit to be over so they can finally release the proper remaster that it deserves.

They'll just move on to the next game to remake and fuck up. My guess is Chrono Trigger. As long as they leave VIII and IX alone and don't touch them then I'll be happy. Square and they're devs (especially Nomura) must rather commit sepuku

 

[Killer8]

I want to know what is even left from the Famicom era of game development.

Considering level design was done on graph paper back then, probably not much.