You might have assumed that during the development of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, its developers were constantly going back to documents written up during the original for references and inspiration. Turns out that wasn’t the case at all, as 20 years later, basically none of those documents were left.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi confirmed as much to Eurogamer when he was asked just how pivotal documentation of the original game was to Remake’s development. “We’re talking about the mid ’90s… There’s almost no documentation left over from that period at all, practically none,” Hamaguchi revealed.
No One Saved Anything From The Development Of Final Fantasy 7
“Data management wasn’t done to modern standards, so yeah, there’s basically nothing,” Hamaguchi went on to say. “There are some character design sketches I think we’ve still got and obviously anything which was published separately, so the Ultimania guides have a few of the original documents in there, but in terms of stuff like… there’s practically nothing to work on.”
That posed a problem for Hamaguchi when he was chosen to helm the development of FF7 Remake, as he admits fearing he would overwrite the original game and make its remake feel more like a fan fiction version as opposed to a retelling. Since there were no documents from the original game’s development to go back and reference, there was no easy way to double-check they were sticking to Final Fantasy 7’s core while trying to make an entirely new experience more than two decades later.
Thankfully, despite a lack of original documents, there was another way for Hamaguchi to make sure he was doing Final Fantasy 7 justice. “Unfortunately, none of that documentation is around. But what really has helped me and kind of makes up for that is the fact that a lot of those legendary creators that you mentioned are very much still involved in the project,” Hamaguchi noted.
While the documents used to create the original Final Fantasy 7 might no longer exist, thankfully, many of the people who created those documents are not only still here, but they’ve been involved with the development of the FF7 trilogy. Tetsuya Nomura, Yoshinori Kitase, and others who played a role in Final Fantasy 7’s creation were all on hand for Hamaguchi to check in with during the creation of Remake, and presumably still are as development on Part 3 continues.
Final Fantasy 7 isn’t the only example of a huge game from the PS1 era where it didn’t occur to developers to save anything. Toys For Bob, the team behind the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, revealed that none of the source code from the original games had been saved, so they effectively had to create the remasters from scratch.
