ivalentin
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V-Gears


			
				
					
						
						
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        <h2>Preface</h2>
        <p>
            On January 31st, 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released to the
            Japanese public. This single game both revolutionized and raised
            the bar of Japanese style console role playing games. It success
            was so staggering, it placed Squaresoft firmly on top the the the
            genre, displacing the Dragon Quest series created by the rival Enix
            company.
        </p>
        <p>
            The story of how this game came to be has a story more expansive
            than the game itself. It starts, as most stories do, with its
            prequel.
        </p>
        <h2>Squaresoft and the "Big N"</h2>
        <p>
            In 1994, Squaresoft released Final Fantasy VI in Japan through an
            exclusive contract with Nintendo. The game was for the Super
            Famicom, or more internationally known as the Super Nintendo
            Entertainment System. This game was a massive best-seller, and the
            powers that be decided to have the game "cross the pond" as it were
            for the U.S. audiences.
        </p>
        <p>
            Sadly, as Nintendo had exclusive distribution rights to all games
            in the United States, the decision was made to alter the game. The
            traditional Final Fantasy logo was changed to one American
            audiences were more used to. The sequel number was also dropped
            from VI to III. Nintendo had only released two Final Fantasy games
            in the states. Part I for the NES, and Part IV for the SNES (Part
            IV was actually going to be a NES game, but was ported up in the
            middle of it's development. That, however is another story). The
            game was also edited for content. Several silly things like a
            programmers room and a porno book were removed. All in all the
            sales were modest, but it was nowhere near the success that the
            game enjoyed in Japan.
        </p>
        <p>
            It was often said that the U.S. market was not appropriate for
            Japanese-style RPGs.
        </p>
        <p>
            After the release of FF6 in the U.S., Nintendo started work on a
            new video game system. Codenamed the "Ultra 64" it was boasting a
            new 3D graphics core and a CD-ROM format for it's games. At the
            time, Nintendo and Sony were working together to create the
            "PlayStation Expansion" (PSX) CDROM system as an add-on to the
            Super Nintendo. It was also rumored that this technology was going
            to be in the Ultra 64 system as well.
        </p>
        <p>
            Squaresoft decided that movie-like role playing games that took
            advantage of this new multimedia technology was the future. They
            invested billions of yen into SGI workstations when it was learned
            that the Ultra 64 was going to use a 64 bit R4300 MIPS
            architecture. A new threaded 3D engine was developed for the Final
            Fantasy series. A demo of the new technology was created on their
            new development systems. It was a simple battle engine using the
            characters from FF6. It was assumed that this would be the
            beginnings of FF7 for the Ultra 64.
        </p>
        <p>
            Then the rug was pulled out from under Square's feet by Nintendo.
        </p>
        <p>
            Nintendo and Sony had a falling out. An issue came about when both
            companies disagreed over who got to license the games for the new
            CD-ROM systems. Sony wanted control, but Nintendo balked. Nintendo
            also had problems as Sony was already making the sound chip for the
            SNES which was difficult to program for. Nintendo wanted more
            control.
        </p>
        <p>
            Nintendo went behind Sony and asked Phillips for assistance, as
            they also could license CD-ROM technology. When Sony found out that
            Nintendo was going to someone else, (and a foreign one at that!),
            it was the last straw and pulled their technology. They also
            convinced Phillips, Matsushita, NEC, and Pioneer not to license any
            optical drive technology to Nintendo either.
        </p>
        <p>
            Going alone, Sony decided to take their popular System 11 arcade
            boards, tack on a CD-ROM and called it the Playstation.
        </p>
        <p>
            Nintendo, without a drive system, quietly disclosed to their third
            parties that the Ultra 64 was going to be cartridge based. The
            maximum limit that any game could be was 32 megabytes. Squaresoft
            was now in a bind, they had invested millions of yen into creating
            a movie-like RPG experience and now had to cut it down to fit on a
            cartridge. When it was revealed that the PSX would also be using a
            MIPS CPU, Square abandoned Nintendo and gained an exclusive
            distribution contract with Sony. The groundwork for Final Fantasy
            VII was now laid and could continue unobstructed.
        </p>
        <h2>The Production</h2>
        <p>
            Halfway through the production of Final Fantasy VII, two very
            important things happened. First a second team was spun off to
            start production of Final Fantasy VIII. This allowed a staggered
            development cycle were when one game one done, another would be
            half done, cutting production time in half. Also half way through
            production, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the producer, learned that his
            mother Aki had died. Sakaguchi drew on this death and altered the
            story in a radical way. It now revolved around life and death and
            the earth.
        </p>
        <h2>The Release</h3>
        <p>
            The game was shipped to stores in Japan January 31, 1997, but not
            without a few problems. First, the game was incomplete. A few
            scenes were not able to run correctly before release. Also the
            extra bosses were not added in time. These were minor issues that
            no one missed, and were later fixed in the U.S. version.
        </p>
        <p>
            In the States, a demo of FF7 was released with the game
            "Tobal No.1". It was a modified version of the first part of the
            game using characters not available until later. It was also the
            first release in the states that called the game by it's proper
            number. It was also the first time American audiences saw a true
            Final Fantasy logo. The game was released in the the states
            September 3rd, 1997. This release fixed several bugs, included the
            missing bosses, and the nonworking scenes were added properly.
        </p>
        <p>
            Later, Japan got a re-release of the expanded U.S. version, along
            with a scene viewer and other bonus content. This was called "Final
            Fantasy VII International"
        </p>
        <h2>The PC Port</span></h2>
        <p>
            With the wild success of FF7, Square's shareholders were beginning
            to pressure the company to start diversifying their products. At
            the time, Square was only making games exclusively for Sony, and
            limiting their market. It also became apparent that their older
            games were not suitable for more modern systems. Even Final Fantasy
            VI, the game previous, was fixed to a single platform and could not
            be adapted easily to other computer systems. Square made the choice
            to update their old games to modern programming languages and
            platforms. They also decided to port Final Fantasy VII to the PC.
        </p>
        <p>
            Square chose Eidos of the publisher for their PC ports. At the time
            Eidos has successfully handled the conversion and release of Core's
            widely popular "Tomb Raider" game from the PSX to PC. Having
            experience in marketing and distributing PSX to PC conversions, the
            company seemed to be the right choice.
        </p>
        <p>
            In the beginning, however, the PC port suffered many problems. When
            the contract programmers received the FF7 source code from Square,
            it was a horrible state of atrophy. When work started on the port,
            it was soon discovered that they had received an earlier, buggy
            version of the program. Work had to stop while Square accumulated a
            later version. It was also discovered that the people and equipment
            used to create the backgrounds for FF7, were now being used for FF8
            and FF9. There was no way to re-render the backgrounds and the port
            team was forced to use the original low color/low resolution PSX
            dependencies. The movies faired worse. Squaresoft never rendered
            high resolution versions of the movies. The movie format was
            incompatible with Microsoft's DirectX system, so it was decided to
            convert the compressed PSX movies to one more native to a PC
            platform. This caused disastrous results. The movies were now a
            copy of a copy of a low resolution render.
        </p>
        <p>
            Square also refused to have anything added. It was to be a straight
            port of the PSX version with the same exact interface. Concessions
            were only made to text input. The game could run in a "high
            resolution" mode of 640x480, which isn't really a lot in terms of
            PC resolution. It was also limited to 15-bit color.
        </p>
        <p>
            More problems arose. The PSX had the ability to use different color
            depths on the screen at the same time. Many graphical effects
            depended on this ability. Many PC graphic cards did not have the
            ability to use color look up tables when placed into high color
            modes. This caused the game to go into a low resolution software
            renderer if this functionality wasn't available. FF7 was also
            designed for 15 bit graphics. This caused noticeable color
            banding on a PC screen. The sound architecture is also wildly
            different and suffered as well.
        </p>
        <p>
            The PC port was released in June of 1998. It was late, buggy, and
            not very well ported. The game initially was incompatible with
            Cyrix and AMD CPUs, to which Eidos technical support simply refused
            to support at first. Many people with high-end graphic cards found
            themselves forced into a software renderer due to a lack of a color
            lookup system. Movies played upside down, or crashed the system all
            together, as it used a 3rd-party renderer. The only solution Eido
            came up with was to offer a save game past the crash point,
            destroying hours of work by the user. Many sound cards were not
            designed for MIDI playback and the software player used too much in
            the way of resources, slowing the whole system. The initial
            keyboard configuration was grossly unintuitive, using only the
            numeric keypad. Many laptops without one couldn't even use the game
            as you had to use the number pad to access the configuration
            menu... and the box was ugly.
        </p>
        <p>
            Eidos was dropped when Final Fantasy VIII for the PC was released.
        </p>
        <h2>Where are they now?</h3>
        <p>
            The PC port is now out of print and does not run on the Windows NT
            type kernels due to some farflung misallocated pointers. Many now
            play FF7 via PSX emulation. With this way of playing the game,
            graphic modes higher than 1024x768 resolution, 32-bit color, and
            texture filtering, can all be used. The PSX version is also stable
            and for the most part, bug free. The engine has continued to be
            built upon. It has also been used in other non-Final Fantasy games
            such as "Parasite Eve", which was the first to support full body
            textures before FF8. The PC port is still supported by a small band
            of users. Unofficial patches have also been released with varying
            degrees of success. Not bad for a little engine that could.
        </p>
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