Final Fantasy creator finds plans for his first-ever game with Square while "decluttering," featuring detailed instructions like "give apple" to get a "kiss" and "kill lion with revolver"

Final Fantasy
(Image credit: Square)

Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi is decluttering his files, and has recently unearthed the original 1984 pitch for his first game, drawn on graph paper with very detailed instructions on what the game entails, and cute drawings to go alongside it.

Sakaguchi shares on Twitter several images from his original pitch, all of which are hand-written on graph paper. As translated by GamesRadar+, the tweet reads, "As part of my decluttering series. 1984. The first game proposal I wrote."

The Death Trap was only released in Japan, for the popular regional PC platforms like the PC-98. Like most of the games from this era, it's an adventure game, in particular this one is text based, with input from the player like "give apple" to get a "kiss," and "kill lion with revolver." Alongside the story, there are very detailed images and maps, which were fairly innovative for the time.

It was popular enough to receive a sequel, and proved to be the first in a long line of successes for both Square and Sakaguchi. Whether you can read Japanese or not, the plans are interesting to look at, with detailed maps, drawings, and flow charts of how the game works. There are also some text input descriptions written in English to enjoy.

Sakaguchi has been sharing a lot of his plans on Twitter during the great declutter, so follow him to see more sneak peaks of video game history.

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George Young
Freelance News Writer

Freelance writer, full-time PlayStation Vita enthusiast, and speaker of some languages. I break up my days by watching people I don't know play Pokemon pretty fast.

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