CHAPTER I In The Beginning
Hironobu Sakaguchi I grew up in a place called Ibaraki, a rural region north of Tokyo.
There was a cliff face close to my family home. While I was in primary school, I’d go there and chip away at the rock in search of precious stones and fossils. One day, an elderly man holding a briefcase walked up to me. He said that he’d seen me there, working away each day. He explained that he was a geologist. The man opened a briefcase, which was filled with immaculate fossils and precious stones and asked if I would like to swap one of my rough specimens with a polished one. Then, every week for about two years, I swapped my excavations with the man, till I had enough polished stones to fill a display case in my bedroom.
Our house was filled with books. My mother, who was a bookworm, owned a twenty-volume work about bugs and butterflies, written by a British etymologist. I had taken piano lessons since the age of five and, when I arrived at high school, I founded a band called Bichou, or ‘beautiful butterfly’. I thought I would grow up to be a professional musician and started putting on lots of concerts at school. I booked a large venue for my band to play and didn’t want to lose money on it, so I printed off tickets and started selling them at a local girls’ school. When my teachers found out, I was nearly expelled.
When I arrived at university the Apple 2 had just come out and I wanted one. They were incredibly expensive. I was a student and couldn’t afford that kind of outlay, of course, so I went to Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics district, where they sold cheap knock-offs. Even those machines were pretty expensive but still I managed to buy one. Once I had the machine I wanted to buy software, so I needed a part-time job. That’s when I saw the role advertised for Square. It seemed like a good fit, because I was studying programming at university and figured I could pick up some experience on the job. I still dreamed of becoming a musician.
Square had just started when I joined. They were renting an old hairdresser’s place. We had to take the mirrors off the walls. We didn’t have enough computers for everyone, so we had to take turns. Our founder, Masafumi Miyamoto, worked in the science and technology department at Keio University, which was next door to the hairdresser’s. His plan was to rope in technically minded university students to work at the company – but he never actually ended up hiring any students from that college.
I took the job because my computer skills were still quite basic. I felt that, if I’d have tried to go to one of the more established companies like Konami or Namco, who were already very well known, I would have been given just menial tasks. My interview was with the vice-president Hisashi Suzuki. He was in a similar place to me in life: very young and only part-time. It was all quite casual. Suzuki was like, “Yeah, yeah, come along and join us.”
For my first job I was assigned as one of the programming team for a game based on the TV gameshow Torin-ingen, which is a birdman contest where people create costumes and see how far they can fly while jumping off a pier into the sea. Then, suddenly, the team was disbanded and the project cancelled. I later found out it was because Miyamoto hadn’t secured the licence, and the TV show had found out what we were doing and shut us down. That’s the kind of company we were back then – chaotic. Soon after that we moved to a more professional three-room office in Yokohama. It was a good place to be because we were all students there and it was like having a place to hang out. That’s when we started work on our first game: The Death Trap. Others followed, but we certainly didn’t have any big hits at that time. It was pretty tough, to be honest.
When the Torin-ingen team was wiped out I was moved on to my next project and became a director. I wasn’t really promoted; I was just always a director from then on. I was 22 years old when I became a full-time employee. We didn’t go home often during those years. We’d start work at midday and carry on through till the evening, then we’d go out drinking. The laws were different then so the arcades could be open all night. We’d spent most of the night playing, then in the morning we’d either go home to catch a few hours sleep or go straight back to the office. It was all new. My generation was the first to make videogames. There were no seniors in the company; we could make our own decisions. We were totally free. The sense of liberty was incredible.
About that time we desperately needed to hire artists to draw for these games, so we hired three people from a local art university. One of those was a friend of Nobuo Uematsu. One day she told me about this young composer friend of hers. It turned out that he worked in a local record store I used to visit.
“There were no seniors in the company. We were totally free” Hironobu Sakaguchi
“There was a feeling that the company was going to shut down” Nobuo Uematsu
Nobuo Uematsu
After I finished university, I wanted to become a professional composer but there were no jobs around. I lived in an apartment with a lot of artists, novelists and composers in a similar position to me. We’d sit around and talk and drink at night, but none of us really had any job prospects at the time. One of these friends, Miki Yukinoura, was a graphic designer at this small game company called Square. She had worked on Square’s very first game, The Death Trap, and came to me and asked whether I would like to contribute some music to a new game they were making. It was called Cruise Chaser Blassty, and they needed some extra tracks written, as they planned to release the game with a vinyl record. I wrote the music at home, using a four-track recorder and a bunch of different synthesisers.
At the time I was working parttime in a record rental shop close to where I was living in Hiyoshi, Yokohama. The shop was just around the corner from Square’s offices at the time. So, even before I was asked to do this work, I already knew Hironobu from when he’d come into the store and rent Kate Bush records.
Now, at that time, I had a lot of strange, slightly odd people in my personal life – people with what you might almost describe as occult powers. One of these guys came to me and said: “Mr Uematsu: your life is about to turn around. You’re going to be a big success.” The very next week I was walking in Yokohama and, by chance, Hironobu was on the other side of the street. We crossed to chat. He asked me what I was up to and then told me that there were plans to make Square into a proper company, and would I like to come along and join. That was my interview, right there in the street.
Sakaguchi About that time Miyamoto came to me and said, “We are going to be a more serious company now.” That made it easier for me to invite new people on board. When I ran into Nobuo in the street I told him we were going to be a more professional place. In an effort to become a more serious company, Miyamoto decided to rent a new studio in the Ginza, Tokyo’s highclass district.
Uematsu That was part of his pitch to me: Square was going to move to the Ginza or one of the other terrifically expensive areas in central Tokyo. I figured that the company must be doing incredibly well. That definitely influenced my decision to accept the offer. We actually did move to that luxurious office, about two or three months later. It was a proper office building. But the rent there was ridiculously high: around £10,000 per month. After a couple of months we just couldn’t pay, and moved out.
Sakaguchi The rent at this new, smaller office in Okachimachi was about a tenth of that in the Ginza.
Uematsu That extended the company’s life expectancy, but Square still didn’t have a hit game. Among those of us on the shop floor there was a feeling that the company was going to shut down soon. But we were all young. It was no big deal. We just figured we’d go and do something else instead.
Sakaguchi Now, we’d had one good stroke of fortune. A year after I joined the company full-time we hired Nasir Gebelli, a programmer from Iran who had moved to America after the Iranian cultural revolution. He was a legend in the Apple 2 programming world and one of my gods. How did we manage to convince such a famous programmer to move to Japan to work for a tiny software company? Well, Miyamoto was visiting the US and he met Gebelli at a party. Gebelli explained that he had just split up with his wife and needed a job. He had absolutely no money at all – just a Ferrari that he’d been left in the divorce settlement! Miyamoto told me the news and, in the same breath, explained that I was going to be Gebelli’s minder in Japan. I protested: “I can’t even speak English!”
When Gebelli arrived, he told me that he would only eat steak. Every day I’d have to take him out to a steak restaurant. I was 23 years old.