Former PlayStation Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has pulled the curtain back on how Sony tempted Square to ditch Nintendo and bring Final Fantasy to the PlayStation, singling out a former Sony Music veteran who was a real "schmoozer."
Reflecting on his time as the lead account manager for Japanese publishers and developers, Yoshida says the goal was to ensure that all major games from the region came to PlayStation. And at the time, few were bigger than Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
"When a new one came out you had long lines of customers waiting to buy them," Yoshida tells VentureBeat. "It made the national news when a new Dragon Quest came out. There was controversy over kids calling out sick from school to stay home and play games."
One problem. Both Square and Enix were "close to Nintendo" and initially "weren't interested" at all.
What follows is well-worn ground, with Yoshida saying that Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was "disappointed" when he learned that the Nintendo 64 would continue using cartridges. "Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo to change that plan, but they wouldn’t," Yoshida adds.
PlayStation offering the CD-ROMs that the Nintendo 64 wouldn't certainly gave Sony an in, but a deal wasn't guaranteed. Getting the signature came about thanks partly to a Sony Music veteran who had an industry trick or two up their sleeves.
"Our team – my boss was a schmoozer," he says. "He’d come from Sony Music. He hung out a lot with the executives from Squaresoft, throwing parties at his apartment. Eventually we were able to get Squaresoft to commit to the PlayStation. They brought all their franchises from Nintendo to the PlayStation."
Funnily enough, the move also prompted Enix to bring Dragon Quest to PlayStation, as the team had always wanted to release the JRPG "on the console with the largest installed base."
It's not the first time we've heard about Sony Music's role in PlayStation's early days. In an interview with Eurogamer, Fellow PlayStation alumni Shawn Layden paints an amusing picture of the same period.
"When [Sony] decided they were getting into the game business, they knew they had the technology, the engineers," he recalled. "But they said, 'Let's be honest, we sell electronics'. Sony knew that without entertainment DNA, we would not be successful.
"So the initial stage was made a joint venture between Sony Electronics and Sony Music. Half the company was from the music side and, well, you could see it on the shop floor at 8am. All the hardware engineers were at their desks wearing their Sony vests, working on their engineering thing. And then around 10 through 11am, all the Sony Music guys would come in - hungover, sunglasses, cigarettes hanging out their mouths. They'd look at the Nikkei paper for 45 minutes, drink a cup of tea, and then go: 'alright, lunch.' They'd all stand up. They'd all leave."
Layden goes on to say that you wouldn't see them for the rest of the day because Sony Music populated sales, marketing, advertising, and publisher relations. "So those were the guys who would go out with the people at Square and ply them with whiskey until the wee hours of the morning to finally get Final Fantasy 7 off of Nintendo and onto PlayStation."
Real schmoozers, indeed.
Final Fantasy creator says the original JRPG's programmer was "like a god" to him: "I still strongly feel that the core program itself is the ‘life’ of a game."
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