When the director of Square Enix's recent Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles remaster, Kazutoyo Maehiro, admitted that the company no longer had the source code for the original PlayStation version, it keenly illustrated how preservation wasn't a key concern for many developers in the '90s.
Now, Naoki Hamaguchi – the man in charge of the Final Fantasy VII remake project – has revealed that the same thing is true of that iconic game, too – at least when it comes to design documentation.
Speaking in a lengthy (and excellent) interview with our chums over at Eurogamer, Hamaguchi explains that "there's almost no documentation left over from that period at all, practically none."
He adds:
"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. There's some character design sketches I think we've still got and obviously anything which was published separately, so the Ultimania guides have a few of the original documents in there but in terms of stuff like… for example part way through development written documents, design documents, etcetera… Yeah, there's practically nothing to work on."
Hamaguchi explains that the one thing he didn't want to do was "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."
He adds:
"If there was an amount of that design documentation left over from the original games, that probably might make my job there in avoiding that problem a lot easier! Because I could just obviously look through that documentation and go, okay, this is what the original intent was, it's all down here. I'll just try and copy that and any changes will be based on that. As I said, unfortunately, none of that documentation is around. But what really has helped me and kind of makes up for that is the fact that a lot of those legendary creators that you mentioned are very much still involved in the project."
The individuals he's referring to include the likes of Kitase Yoshinori (FF7 director), Nomura Tetsuya (FF7 artist), Toriyama Motomu (FF7 event planner) and Nojima Kazushige (FF7 writer), all of whom are "still involved in the remake projects and they're available very easily so I can go and check things against them."
Having these people on hand was a massive help to Hamaguchi in the absence of original design material:
Every time I may be concerned or worried about - okay, is this really what's at the core of Final Fantasy VII? Is this what the original intent was? How do I change that? Should I change that? I can very easily go and talk to these guys and they can let me know and give me the outlook from the original creative team perspective. So I think that really does help actually because once I know that, okay, we've got a good understanding that's been passed down from the mouths of the original creators, then we can work out okay how we reimagine that and re-present that in a new game presentation for a new audience.
I think that is perhaps one of the big reasons why it's been such a success, really. So I really am grateful about having them on hand. Even if there's no documentation, we can kind of get it from the horse's mouth.