Games industry icons: Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi

Even as a child, Hironobu Sakaguchi, born on November 25, 1962, had a wide range of interests. He devours the books from his mother’s extensive library, likes to collect stones from nature and, even as a primary school pupil, was hooked on music, more precisely on the instruments piano and guitar. The latter goes so far that Hironobu starts a band with friends in high school and sells tickets for a concert without consulting the school. The anger about this is great and almost causes a reprimand, but underlines his passion for music, which he can even imagine as a professional career at first.

But as fate would have it, things turned out very differently. The Japanese man who grew up in the city of Hitachi enrolled in computer science at Yokohama State University in 1980 and made numerous new acquaintances in the course of his studies. One of his fellow students is Hiromichi Tanaka, who is about ten months his senior and was already a real gaming enthusiast back then.

Tanaka’s enthusiasm for role-playing games like Sir-Tech’s Wizardry series quickly spread to Sakaguchi, making him not only desperate for an Apple II home computer, but also beginning to suffer from his discipline in class. Instead of attending lectures conscientiously, Sakaguchi prefers to play Ultima and Wizardry or program on an inferior Apple II replica that he has found somewhere in Tokyo’s electronics mall Akihabara. Sakaguchi’s monthly budget is tight, his curiosity to try new programs; but unbroken.

Released for Japanese home computers in October 1984, The Death Trap is considered the very first game by Hironobu Sakaguchi and Square. There was no sound back then, but there were nicely made still images that created atmosphere.

Source: Moby Games




To solve this dilemma, the then 21-year-old looked for a part-time job together with Tanaka. Thanks to his excellent programming skills, Sakaguchi finally found what he was looking for in the software department of the Japanese electronics company Den-Yu-Sha, which was founded by Masafumi Miyamoto in September 1983.

The interesting thing is that Square, as the company is called, has practically nothing to do with the day-to-day business and concentrates much more on the development of video games, an industry that experienced massive growth in Japan in the early 1980s. “I had so much fun when I first started at Square,” Sakaguchi recalled in 2014 to British website Eurogamer .

In Will: The Death Trap 2 from 1985, Sakaguchi lets Agent Benson – the star of the first part – save the world again. The scene is Torinia, a small island in the Pacific where a nuclear bomb is stored.

Source: Moby Games




“During that time, the development studio was in a rented apartment. Being so poor, I often stayed in the office because they had a bathroom and air conditioning. I actually never really went home.”

Start with an agent adventure

Sakaguchi is one of the first employees at Newcomer Square and is initially assigned to the game adaptation of the Japanese TV show Torin-ingen. However, problems in obtaining the license caused development to stop early on, whereupon Sakaguchi tackled an adventure called The Death Trap as the lead designer and scenario writer.

Sakaguchi’s mecha game Cruise Chaser Blassty (1986) is later referenced multiple times in Final Fantasy, most recently as the boss of the same name in Final Fantasy 14: Heavensward.

Source: Moby Games




In the role of special agent Benson, players are tasked with rescuing a high-ranking scientist from the clutches of a fictional African country in order to prevent him from being forced to build bioweapons for the rogue state.

The Death Trap, set in the Cold War of the 1980s, was released in October 1984 for NEC’s PC-8801 home computer and sold not least thanks to its rather exciting story, atmospheric still image graphics and the option of being able to enter parsers directly in Japanese (previous Games of this kind only worked in English), so well that Square immediately had a sequel developed.

Sakaguchi is once again allowed to act as lead designer and ups the ante both narratively and mechanically. Compared to the completely silent first work, Will: The Death Trap 2, available from June 1985, also offers music and sound effects. reward for the trouble? Over 100,000 copies sold and a lot of credit for Sakaguchi and his team for just delivering Square’s very first box office hit.

First steps on the NES: In the Sakaguchis action game King’s Knight (1987) you guide a brave knight through vertically scrolling levels, collect power-ups and flatten all kinds of nasty fantasy creatures.

Source: Moby Games

Square suddenly rides a wave of success and starts diversifying the software lineup. It begins with Cruise Chaser Blassty, a first-person mecha RPG that engages teenage boys from Earth in an interstellar war – a concept Sakaguchi devises with Kazuhiko Aoki.

The music is contributed by Takashi Uno and the extremely talented Nobuo Uematsu, who later will often work with Sakaguchi. Cruise chaser Blassty stormed into stores just ten months after Will: The Death Trap 2 (on April 30, 1986 to be precise) and later even got his own manga series due to the quite interesting plot.