Nobuo Uematsu Reveals Early Struggles and Behind-the-Scenes Stories of Final Fantasy

Nobuo Uematsu shared new stories about the early days of Final Fantasy during a recent talk show stream, translated by Genki on X/Twitter.

One memory he recalled was about a game-breaking bug in the original Final Fantasy. The problem was only discovered after the cartridges had already been manufactured for the Famicom release in 1987. With no other option, Square staff had to slip warning notes into more than 500,000 copies. Everyone took part in the process, including Uematsu, pixel artist Kazuko Shibuya, and programmer Ken Narita.

"if this happens the game will break, so do not delete this…"

Uematsu also explained how he first joined Square. Before meeting Hironobu Sakaguchi by chance in Hiyoshi, a mysterious stranger told him, “Next week your life will change.” Shortly after, Sakaguchi shared his plan to turn Square into a real company and asked Uematsu to come aboard. Uematsu agreed right away without even submitting a resume, later calling the encounter his “true interview.”

His first projects at Square didn’t succeed, but when Sakaguchi suggested creating Final Fantasy, the game went on to reshape the studio’s future.

Uematsu also revealed how the iconic Prelude theme came to be. After the game was finished, Sakaguchi suddenly rushed into his room with an urgent request:

“Quick, make a song now! Because we have to submit various things to Nintendo. Make a song now!”

Under this pressure, Uematsu composed the Prelude in about 15 minutes.

He added that the original version had a wrong note because of hardware limitations and programming constraints. Since the track was written so quickly, there was no time to check it properly. Later releases of Final Fantasy fixed the mistake.

Source:

x.com

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About FINAL FANTASY

For over 35 years, the FINAL FANTASY series has delighted generations of gamers and millions of players worldwide through beloved role-playing adventures that are built upon the benchmarks of spectacular visuals, highly imaginative worlds, rich stories, memorable characters, and technical and gameplay innovation leading the industry and earning the highest accolades from around the world. Each mainline game in the series is a completely new experience, and an ideal entry-point to the series. Titles of the series have sold over 203 million units worldwide.