An iconic game developer who played a major role in the development of games like Final Fantasy and Secrets of Mana has revealed that despite working on one of the biggest RPG series in gaming, he had never even come across the genre until he started work on it.
Once described by Doom creator John Romero as his “programming god”, programmer Nasir Gebelli is a legend of game development, having programmed the first three entries in the Final Fantasy series, as well as Secrets of Mana. But despite his clear impact on RPG history, he revealed in an interview with GamesRadar+ that until the first Final Fantasy game, he had never even seen an RPG before.
“I thought it was pretty similar to what I was doing for Apple in the same processor,” he begins, “so as far as coding, it was pretty simple. There was no learning curve. But I’d never seen any role-playing games until Final Fantasy.” Having never worked on an RPG before, this understandably provided some challenges for Gebelli. “For example, you’re playing this level, and this level has this many messages. While you’re playing the game, if the computer can create this background and messages and store them in the temporary memory, and if needed display them, it’s gonna take much less memory.”
That being said, Gebelli notes that the challenges of working on something so new were part of what made the work so enjoyable. “It was a challenge, but at the same time it was exciting to be able to do something different.”
With hundreds of people working on today’s Final Fantasy titles, it can be hard to appreciate just how big a role Gebelli alone played in the series’ early development, with some developers believing that the original games took 16 years to receive a remake simply because Gebelli’s code was too good to replicate.
For more Final Fantasy, check out our list of the best Final Fantasy games of all time.
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