I’m going to kick off a new regular feature in my blogs where I ‘transcribe’ an article in a gaming or anime magazine of the past into feature form like this so they can be more easily read and enjoyed. I’ve shared snippets of old magazines for years now on social media but feel there’s also value in preserving them like this too – and adding my own thoughts and commentary.

So, to kick us off in this first ‘Pages of the Past’, we’ve got a glimpse behind the doors of SquareSoft’s Redmond, Washington HQ in May 1995. This is already interesting because according to Wikipedia, SquareSoft moved to California in 1994. But rather than a discrepancy in recorded company history, it may have been a feature written a while back and only then made it into the magazine. It’s a sweet thing written by John Gurka. For reasons of clarity, I corrected a couple of spelling errors.

Squaresoft, the final fron­tier. I have been able to boldly go where not many have gone before. I wish I could relive those two days over again…

Redmond, WA, is definitely the place to be! Not only is there some absolutely gorgeous scenery, but it is home to some of the best video game companies anywhere, includ­ing Nintendo and most importantly, Squaresoft. In 1992 when the Super NES came out, I bought the system about three months after its debut. I had already played Final Fantasy for the Nintendo 8-bit system and loved it. So seeing Final Fantasy II on the Super NES Is what made me buy the system. As soon as I left the electronic store with my new system in hand, I went to the local video store. I practically ran to the video game section and grabbed a copy. I got home and hooked up my system. Final Fantasy was already up and running. On that day, I had yet to play a better video game. That is, of course, until Final Fantasy III came out. On that first day that I played FF2, I fell in love with Squaresoft. It had been a dream of mine to visit their headquarters since ’92, and it finally come true.

I could barely contain my excitement on the plane ride to Seattle. Once I landed, I knew that Square was only a hop, skip and jump away. Mirko Freguia, the assistant product manager at Squaresoft, picked me up from the airport. Some 20 minutes later, we had arrived at the headquarters. Walking through the doors made me realize that my dream was becoming a reality! They sat me down in the conference room where they had a fan­tastic home-video system set up: a big 35-inch screen with one heck of a sound system. When they fired up The Secret of Evermore, it nearly knocked me over. I talked with Alan Weiss, the producer over at Square, for about a half hour about Evermore and all the features it had. He played through it for about 45 minutes, showing me some of the really unique features in the game. This game is done in a very Mana-like fashion. The fighting is the same, and you even bring up ring menus just like Mana.

You have an Energy Bar at the bottom of the screen that works almost exactly like Mana except rather than going from zero to 100 per­ cent, you are allotted a cer­tain amount of energy in that bar. Once you use that ener­gy by running or swinging your sword, you must wait a fairly long time in order to fill it up again. Also, there is magic in the game—only this time, it is alchemy. You must learn combinations for spells then find all the right ingredi­ents In order to cast them. All in all, this looks like a really cool game.

The only thing I haven’t gotten to get a really close look at is the story line. Now in my opinion, the story line is 50 percent of any RPG. If Final Fantasy Ill didn’t have a really decent story line, it would not be quite as cool. So unfortunately I cannot tell you about that, but I do look for­ward to getting a copy of this game and play­ing it. After I got my footage of Evermore, I was taken on a tour of Squaresoft. I met just about everyone who works there. I got to see some of the projects people were working on like David House (left). He is working on a rhinoceros-type enemy for the game. I talked to most of the artists and some of the programmers about the kinds
of things they’re working on. SAGE (Square’s Amazing Graphical Editor) is an in-house tool that is used to convert and collect conceptual designs into binary data for the game. They have special tool program­mers who work full-time on cre­ating new tools for the artists to make their lives a lot easier.

After I met the artists and pro­grammers, I got to meet Jeremy Soule (pic­tured in the upper-right corner) who is the main music and sound guy for Evermore. I must say it was a treat to hear some of the preliminary music that he had written and composed. It is amazing how good computerized sound can be. I heard some of his demo tapes that he used to get the job at Square and it is phenomenal.

I also had the chance to talk to Ted Woolsey who is the main translator for most of Square’s Japanese games we have all come to love. He translated all of FF3 and Mystic Quest, and half of Final Fantasy Legend III and Secret of Mana. He studied Japanese in college and lived in Japan for five years. He will soon be working very hard on Chrono Trigger but is going to have help translating that game. He says that we may see Front Mission over here but nothing is set in stone.

As far as Final Fantasy V goes, keep writing those let­ters. There is a good chance we may get to play that awe­some game yet!

Let’s finish off by seeing how the feature was presented in the magazine: