Next time you're feeling frustrated while playing Final Fantasy 14, I hope you take comfort in knowing director Naoki Yoshida isn't perfect at playing video games, either. In fact, he might have never had his illustrious career at Square Enix if it weren't for failing at the original 1983 Mario Bros. game on his boogery friend's Famicom.
"Failing" might be the wrong word here – it implies 10-year-old Yoshida had a choice in what happened to him. But really, he was bamboozled by a boy lucky enough to have some fancy new technology: an at-home console.
Yoshida recounts through a translator during PAX West's recent Storytime panel, that, one day, his friend across the street wanted to introduce him to a "new way of playing games."
"And I was wondering, 'What do you mean, a new way to play?'" says Yoshida. "When I got to his house and started to see what he had set up, it was this TV monitor, and in it, you can see Mario and Luigi onscreen."
Having only spent his time playing games like Rally-X at arcades at this point, to have a video game in your living room seemed revolutionary. So they dove in. "We were doing our co-op play smoothly," Yoshida remembers. "I would flip over the characters, and my friend would go and kick them off the screen," until they agreed to switch roles.
He thought, wow, "'What a nice guy, he's giving me a chance to do that now'"... until betrayal flicked a young Yoshida right between the eyes. After they switched roles, his friend would punch enemies like he was supposed to, and Yoshida would get ready to kick like he was supposed to, but then his friend would come back and "punch the thing again to reverse it, so that they were revived."
"That was my first experience with PvP," Yoshida says somberly.
It's a tough lesson to learn – try to avoid being a 10-year-old boy in 1983, I suppose – but Mario Bros.' simple yet flexible gameplay nonetheless made an important impression on Yoshida.
"When I was going home," Yoshida says, "of course I hated the guts of my friend, because I just found out how much of a jerk he is.
"But then also, at the same time, I thought to myself, 'I would love to make something like that myself.' Like, I had no foundational knowledge or reason to believe I'm going to be a game creator, but I wanted to make video games from that time on.
"So, I mean, he's a jerk, but I still thank him in the end."
Final Fantasy 14 might follow in World of Warcraft's footsteps with its own housing system, as Square Enix is "heavily discussing the possibility" of adding "special techniques for decorating."
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