Summary
- Square really wanted to remain loyal to Nintendo during the mid-1990s before committing to PlayStation.
- It begged Nintendo to reconsider sticking to cartridges for the N64, needing discs for the scope of its new games.
- Nintendo remained steadfast despite Square’s pleas which led to an infamous, but temporary, breakup between them.
Squaresoft, the studio that would eventually merge with Enix to form Square Enix, went through an infamous and messy breakup with Nintendo in the 1990s. That breakup revolved around Square’s lofty ambitions for the future and Nintendo’s loyalty to cartridges amid a changing landscape, and a former PlayStation boss has shed new light on what exactly happened between the two gaming giants at the time.
After 30 years with Sony, a tenure during which he has worked on every single PlayStation console to date, Shuhei Yoshida left SIE last month. Since then, he has been able to conduct interviews and speak a little more freely about things that went on behind the scenes during his time with the company. That includes the infamous falling out between Square and Nintendo, and more importantly, how and why PlayStation benefitted from it.
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Speaking to GamesBeat, Yoshida explained that Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted to create a “movie-like Final Fantasy game”. Up until that point, the first six Final Fantasy games had been two-dimensional pixel art titles that, due to Square’s close relationship with Nintendo, had launched on the NES and the SNES.
Square Didn’t Just Leave Nintendo In The Dirt In The Mid-’90s
It Begged The Studio To Reconsider Using Cartridges For The N64
Yoshida goes on to explain that upon discovering Nintendo planned to stick with cartridges for the N64 rather than make the move to discs like its competitors – PlayStation and the Sega Saturn – Sakaguchi was very disappointed. So much so that rather than simply defect from Nintendo, which has been the implication when versions of this story have been told in the past, Square and Sakaguchi begged the studio to reconsider.
“Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo to change that plan, but they wouldn’t. They didn’t believe in CD-ROM at all,” Yoshida revealed, noting that’s why Nintendo fobbed the SNES’s CD-ROM add-on project off on Sony. Unable to make Nintendo see the light, Square forged a new relationship with PlayStation, taking Dragon Quest and, more importantly, Final Fantasy along with it.
That allowed Sakaguchi to realize his vision on a platform that could handle it, developing Final Fantasy 7 exclusively for the PS1. That the huge leap forward for the series needed to be spread across three discs alone is evidence that it could never have been a N64 title. I dread to think how many cartridges it would have needed, and I’m assuming even then, multiple cartridges wouldn’t have made FF7 on Nintendo 64 a possibility.
Even though Nintendo and Square’s break-up is a distant memory, the latter’s semi-PlayStation exclusivity is once again a point of contention in 2025. Recent Final Fantasy games failing to meet Square’s expectations suggest the next games in the series will likely launch across multiple platforms. It’s also a little amusing to have seen Nintendo eventually cave to the disc pressure only to return to cartridges for the Switch.
- Released
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January 31, 1997
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Language, Mild Suggestive Themes