Hironobu Sakaguchi, the legendary creator of Final Fantasy, has been doing some "decluttering" recently and has come across something pretty fascinating in the process: his first-ever written video game proposal.
As a result, he has since taken to Twitter/X to share the amazing discovery with his followers online (thanks, Automaton-Media/GamesRadar for the spot), posting some photos of the old stapled-together document, which he states is now more than 40 years old.
In the tweet, Sakaguchi didn't explicitly reveal what the title of the game was, but looking at the story synopsis (written in Japanese), as well as some of the annotated maps and illustrations, Automaton-Media, believes the plan likely belongs to Square's early text adventure, The Death Trap, which was not only Sakaguchi's first video game for the developer, but Square's first completed game, full stop, making it a pretty important piece of the company's history.
This game was developed in 1984 when the company was still a part of Den-Yū-Sha Electric Company, and was released for the PC-88, PC-98, and FM-7. It is set during the 1980s, within a period where the conflict has begun to escalate, and sees players assume the role of a spy named Benson, who is sent to a wartorn African country.
A terrorist organisation has kidnapped a world-famous scientist in an attempt to stockpile biological weapons, and as you'd pretty much expect, it falls to players to go and rescue this scientist from harm's way and scupper the terrorists' plans, with the game being played using a simple parser system, similar to the other adventure game titles of the time. Later on, it was followed by a sequel called Will: The Death Trap II in 1985 for the PC-88, PC-98, FM-7, and Sharp X1, which again featured Benson as the protagonist, but also introduced some added innovations, such as animated graphics and the ability to travel using arrow keys rather than typed commands.
Given that Square Enix has earned somewhat of a negative reputation for losing important materials from the company's history, including Final Fantasy Tactics's source code and a lot of the documentation related to Final Fantasy VII, it's great to see this piece of the studio's history survive. It has also got us curious about what other Square artifacts Sakaguchi might be able to dig up in the future, beyond what he has been posting already online over the last week.