You may not think the '90s were a dead zone of lost records since people were publicly making things like 'Black Hole Sun' by Soundgarden, but in the world of game development, the 1990s might as well be the dawn of civilization. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi says so many of its important artifacts are gone.
"We're talking about the mid '90s... There's almost no documentation left over from that period at all, practically none," Hamaguchi tells Eurogamer in a new interview. "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."
That means most dev materials from the original, 1997 Final Fantasy 7 are stuffed in the back of a drawer or got slimed in a garbage chute at some point, and Hamaguchi can't freely reference them for his remake trilogy. "There are some character design sketches I think we've still got," he says, but that's about it – and that makes it harder to avoid what he's afraid of, writing fanfiction.
"What I really want to avoid here," Hamaguchi says, "is basically because I am such a big fan of the game. Because of that, what I'm not doing is trying to 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."
It's a good thing, then, that many members of Final Fantasy 7's 1990s development team – including director Yoshinori Kitase and artist Tetsuya Nomura – are involved with the remake's creation.
"I really am grateful about having them on hand," says Hamaguchi. "Even if there's no documentation, we can kind of get it from the horse's mouth."
