Shinichiro Kajitani
Vice president, Square USA
"Around that time, Sony approached us, and they told us, “We have the PlayStation coming out and we want to make 3D games. Would you guys be interested?” And at the time, since we were really close to Nintendo, we said, “Well, we’re not sure. We’re pretty much just working with them.” And I asked if it was OK to share that information with Nintendo. And Sony said, “That’s totally fine. Go ahead and show it to them. We just want you to see what we’re doing, and if you like it, then by all means, come work with us on this.” It’s not that we were passing information back and forth between Nintendo and Sony, but
at the time our programmers … started making prototypes that ran on the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 as sort of benchmark software to test each system."
Tatsuya Yoshinari
Programmer, Square Japan
"We were trying to work out whether to do it with the Nintendo machine or not. … There was a while there where we were going back and forth between the N64 and PlayStation, seeing what we could do with 3D graphics on each system."
Motonori Sakakibara
Movie director, Square
"I saw a couple of the tests, but it was obviously different.
The quality was so different. So I thought they’d never take Nintendo because the result was very clear."
Hiroshi Kawai
Character programmer, Square Japan
"
I kind of had a suspicion that things weren’t going too well for the 64 at that point, because … one of my responsibilities … was to write performance applications that compared
how well the 64 fared against the prototype [PlayStation]. And we’d be running
parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you’d have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second. And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]. Of course, the drawback of the [PlayStation] is it didn’t really have a z-buffer, so you’d have these overlapping polygons that you’d have to work around so that you wouldn’t get the shimmering [look]. But on the other hand, there was no way
you’d be able to get anything close to what FF7 was doing [on PlayStation] on the 64 at that time."
There was actually this one trip that [Nintendo] organized for me, [main programmer Ken] Narita-san, a few other lead devs who were working on the battle portion for the
Final Fantasy 6 [Siggraph] demo at that point. … I think Nintendo had been getting signals from Square saying, you know, “Your hardware isn’t up to snuff. Not only in terms of raw 3D performance, but in terms of storage.” And they said, “We’re gonna fabricate this brand new chip,” which was supposed to have a bunch of hardware improvements to get a little bit more performance. Which, my suspicion is they probably just repeated that verbatim from SGI, and I think there was, in general, a disconnect between SGI and Nintendo in terms of what they were expecting the hardware to do. SGI was probably talking more along theoretical lines of what the hardware would be able to do, and they were trying to make it general purpose so that it wasn’t just a 3D rendering machine. But Nintendo had certain specific performance metrics that had to be met, but I don’t think those were communicated well to SGI.
The wires just — they weren’t in sync there. So they sent us down to Mountain View, and I took all that code I was writing for the Shoshinkai to run on the [latest prototype] hardware there. And it didn’t really change in terms of performance."
Hiroshi Kawai
Character programmer, Square Japan
"We spent a few days, I remember, optimizing my code, to try to get a few more polygons out, but it didn’t really make much of a difference. And upon returning to Tokyo, there was a meeting with me, Narita-san, Sakaguchi-san and the major stakeholder of Square, Miyamoto-san. And I had never seen [Miyamoto in person before then]. He just comes in. “OK so, how was it?” And I gave a few figures when asked, but Narita-san was the main person who was talking. And he was essentially saying, “We’re just not getting the performance. We’re nowhere near what we did during the Siggraph demo.” Miyamoto-san just silently acknowledged that, and I didn’t hear anything from them until the point when Sakaguchi-san called [the office] together and said,
“We’re not doing the 64 anymore.” So yeah. I guess in a sense, I kind of provided the objective data to say that the 64 wasn’t suitable for the next-gen Final Fantasy"