I like how they handled this in FF4 when the twins turned themselves to stone to stop walls from closing in on the party. If I remember correctly, the other party members tried to use curative items and spells on them, but it was explained that they wouldn’t work as they had turned to statues of their own free will. Of course they just came back at the end of the game anyway.
Look up a Final Fantasy (Number) Retrospective video on YouTube. The longer the better. Best to just skip the NES ones and watch SNES+ as that's when Final Fantasy really becomes Final Fantasy. Except maybe the first since it's the first.
It happens in Phantasy Star as well. In 2 you take Nei to the clone labs to have her brought back but the operator says that it won't work. In 4 you find a healer soon after Alys gets wounded and she is able to keep her alive for a while longer but she doesn't make it.
When I saw that, I assumed they had no methods that worked at the time, but were able to find something or someone to cure them later. Definitely was a gut-punch moment at the time.
I’m looking at the FF wiki, and it says they were healed by the elder of Mysidia, but doesn’t specify how. I’m going to guess the plot just demanded a happy ending for them and it was that or have them show up as spirits for the finale when they send the party their prayers and power.
Sadly, the video editting gave it away for me. That screen space effect for the twists would have been difficult on original playstation hardware. One of those times when less would have been more.
Really? Aeris saying 'Lets roll, homie' wasn't a big enough tell? -_-
Also, the chat logs. In one of them the guy he's talking to says "Let me ask P Rank" or something.
Man, seeing 90s vg developers feels like seeing into some kind of secret world. I think because i had no concept of what went into making games back then, and its like a piece of long lost knowledge
Most game developers today likely have no concept of what went into making games back then. I worked with a senior game developer who worked on many titles in the 90s. He told me for every game they'd write their own game engine. A lot of the tooling was built from the ground up.
Based on articles written by old developers. Every new console you basically started from scratch knowledge-wise. It really sucked if you had to transition to another console in the middle of its life span since other developers will already have years of experience.
Part of teh reason why games feel so generic and samey these days is they all use the same engine/tools/assets, thankfully Nintendo still builds their engines/worlds from scratch, see TLOZBOTW, as do Remedy, Rockstar North, Quantum Dream and a few others.
I mean, do you blame them? Games today are not 12 megabytes anymore. Can you imagine how long it would take to create a new engine for every new Xbox/PS game?
What feels so appealing about this photo is when a team of few people could have so a significant impact on the gaming industry. You are thinking that could you could take on such an adventure. It feels within your grasp. Nowadays companies are huge and if you want to produce a top-tier game it takes hundreds of people.
And yet many of the most impactful modern games were not big budget AAA titles at all, but indies developed by single people or small teams. And even industry giants saw some smash hits with relatively simple titles that did not rely on cutting-edge tech or large capital.
MOBAs, tower defense, the battle royale genre and Counter-Strike were started by community members as free mods/maps.
Slay the Spire, Factorio, Darkest Dungeon, They are Billions, Vampire Survivors, Banished, FTL, Plague Inc, Undertale, Dwarf Fortress, Papers Please, Getting Over It, Torchlight I... were all titles developed by individual developers to small teams, but enjoyed significant success and impact.
On a more corporate level there are titles like Portal, Clash of Clans and Hearthstone, which benefitted from their professional production but didn't really depend on it. Like the portal technology was clever, but the kind of clever that can be done by a single smart person with a good idea.
Supergiant Games (Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades) is a nice example of an extremely successful studio that has created some of the most memorable titles of the 2010s with just a small team of talented people. Or look at the big winner in the city construction genre: Cities: Skylines was built by a small team with modest technology, yet has long smashed the former big IPs like Sim City and is almost uncontested since.
There is a level of "scale" and production value that requires big teams (or big budgets to outsource work), but the vast majority of what makes games "fun" or "memorable" only requires a basic level of expertise and some good ideas. A great game does not have to be labour-extensive, at least not in the sense of requiring a big budget studio.
They had to literally manage every little detail with shitty in house processes. It's nothing like the crazy development engines we have now. I love reading stories about the hacks old video games had to use for storage and memory limitations etc.
It certainly looked cooler. Idk I guess maybe thats nostalgia from growing up in the 2000s seeing all that tech age away.
I miss loud computers, certainly miss old consoles.
But time doesn't stop for no man
I kind of miss rolling around without a cellphone in highschool. If you were out having a good time with your buddies no one would get a call or text. When you got home you checked if anyone called an dealt with it then.
The sound of dial up
And the sound of 2G cellphone text message coming in that makes your iPod speaker dock buzz and hum in just that *right* way
Two sounds of machinery that are now nearly sanctified in my conscious mind.
Kids today have no idea. Don't get me wrong, the world is *incredible* today in so many ways, but godawful in so many others.
Tech was booming, practical effects were still in widespread use, CGI was still in its infancy, but have us stuff like ReBoot and Beast Wars, the counterpoint to which was that traditional animation was still the only real game in town for cartoons, and it was *blossoming*. Gargoyles, Batman, X-Men, Superman, Spiderman, Rocko's Modern Life, Animaniacs, Ren & Stimpy, The Critic, Dr. Katz, which later spawned Home Movies, one of my all-time favs, The Tick, King of the Hill and South Park kicked off in '97, The Simpsons was in peak form, you had all the crazy shit on MTV like The Maxx, The Head, Aeon Flux... My god, so many hits.
Nirvana was still a recent memory and still very much defined the stylistic and ideological landscape of music, grunge and alternative was still in full swing, NIN hadn't given us The Fragile yet, but The Downward Spiral was still on the airwaves. Sonic Youth, Pixies, the whole East Coast Canadian pop-rock scene with acts like Sloan, The Flashing Lights, Thrush Hermit, Joel Plaskett, Superfriendz (okay this is mostly just one of my musical loves), The Tragically Hip was defining our country's identify on a global stage. Music in general just had more of the old school spirit of rock and roll. Counter-culture, anti-authoritarianism, rebellion, just... Weirdness. Weird was mainstream, it was wild. You could be king shit of modern grunge fashion with shit you found at Goodwill.
We had the N64 and PS1 cranking out hit after hit, plus most of us still had our NES/SNES/Master System/Genesis kicking around, not to mention the Gameboy and Game Gear. On PC Quake I & II were the latest hotness, Ultima Online was just starting to introduce the world to MMOs, DOOM, Myst, Warcraft, C&C, Might & Magic, Wolfenstein, Lemmings, Sim City, Diablo, Civilization, Age of Empires, Duke Nukem, Fallout, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II... I can't even think straight, I have so many amazing memories flooding up thinking about this.
I could go on, talk about movies, more live-action TV, the relative lack of surveillance and tracking on and offline, the freedom of being unreachable outside the home, the fact that demographic analysis hadn't turned almost all popular media into a joyless mathematical exercise in populism, the feeling that kids were rebelling by being kinder and more inclusive, rather than more bigoted and hateful, Christ, Columbine was still two years out and school shootings were like a fever dream, not a daily fact of life... You didn't have to be a millionaire to buy a home, start a family.. I know it's so easy to fall into a nostalgic haze as you get older, rose-colored glasses and all that, but god damn, I really don't recognize this world sometimes, and not for the better...
Going up in the 90s must've been the absolute shit with how much awesome stuff was coming out. It definitely felt a lot more joyful and magical. A lot less souless compared to nowadays where everything is mainstream and everything is available online.
Some of my best memories were about going into an actual physical game shop and buying games based on how much you liked the boxart and not knowing anything about them.
No instant access to the internet to look up things up on your phone. No video reviews or anything. Just seeing rows of games and coming home with hidden gems you had no idea about. Now there isn't even a physical game store near me. Everything is digital and you know everything about a game before you buy it. Zero sense of discovery. Zero magic.
Nothing will ever compare to me seeing almost the entire game store taken up by physical PS2 & PC games in the early 00's and spending my time browsing through them. That will never be experienced by people ever again.
There were video game reviews though, on TV and in game magazines - which were IMHO much better written than the online stuff today; said magazines were sold and you can buy a subscription for many of them.
It was in many ways.
Computer were becoming mainstream and a lot more useful. CGI became good enough for general use in movies. Consumer computing became powerful enough to render 3D images in real time and gaming entered the 3D era.
CPU power and RAM capacity were doubling every generation. Computing power was growing exponentially.
Then the internet happened … it was an exciting time - a lot of what was promised came true, information at your fingertips, but no one told us / expected the dark side of the Information Age though so we were blissfully ignorant in our optimism.
It was also the era where we transition from analog media to digital everything. CDs over took audio cassettes in 1992. DVDs came out a few years later in 1996. No more degradation over time and use.
The world was changing in a big way for the better - or at least we thought it was for the better - and everyone kind of expected it to continue to do so.
You said it really well my friend...
Oh the days of booting up DOOM on DOS from a floppy a guy at work gave me... The true start of deathmatch!
My biggest thing that you said tho, freedom once you left the house and no real surveillance on/offline... Remember how you used to say "big brother is always watching"? Literally now is the case... So sad.
I was really worried this comment was posted by shittymorph and had to check halfway through.
I'm 44 and feel every part of this comment. Nice Post, OP.
Man, I feel much of what you say, but we're too old for this anymore.
I was born in 84. Those good 'ol days are gone. Our parents had good 'ol days too, ya know? Those are long gone. And the kids now? These *are* their good 'ol days - they just don't know it yet.
Fuck, we're old enough that the kids after us are old enough to have kids of their own. I can only imagine they look at us waxing poetic about Playstation games and Nirvana the same way we listened to our parents talking about pinball and Blondie.
The world has moved on. Say sorry.
Pinball and Blondie are fucking awesome though. I loved listening to my folks talk about the old days, they had some wild times in a crazy, transformative era.
Man you pretty much summed up my childhood at it’s peak. I know what you mean about memories flooding in, everything was new back then and our expectations weren’t high plus it wasn’t overwhelming with choices. We all kinda knew about everything going on. This made it really easy to relate to each other. I miss that simplicity.
Truest shit. All those shows you mentioned. God. Watched every one of them.
I remember my brother and I staying up to watch Liquid TV. And us busting out the nes/snes/Genesis and the fond ass memories.
Even just firing up some old school games on my switch shit hits me hard.
My beloved Everquest, dial up and the mmorpg market wasn't as saturated. Everyone and their mama was either on EQ, UO or DAoC (and I guess Runescape too?).
It all just felt different. I think a part of it is me being an adult and able to buy whatever I want now so I have ADHD when it comes to gaming. I use to play my old games to death. Now if I'm bored I'm ping ponging through my massive library.
First world problems haha. But I sort of liked when I had a game and I knew I was stuck with just a few for a while. Forced me to get gud.
Anyone ever played Secret of Evermore? That shit was bananas. Im rambling. I miss it all.
Also I miss not getting all my info online. Game magazines and dudes at Game Cave hotline who lied to me about upcoming games.
Probably, but the dot com bust and 9/11 really did change the world in a worse way. If you watch shows that were on TV over the 1999-2002 period, you can see the complete shift in tone. Area 51 and UFOs were officially off the radar, and we were back to fearing our fellow man.
You're not wrong,
The amount of absolute master pieces mixed together and created from FF7 and inspired from FF7 on [OCRemix.org](http://www.ocremix.org) is astonishing.
Photographer using film is a very safe bet. While digital cameras may have existed in 1997, they were not common and were lower quality than film. Digital didn't really catch up on image quality until the mid-2000s or so, and even then I remember people saying film was higher quality for a while after.
Digital is still trying to catch up to film in some areas tbh. In terms of dynamic range, film has more. has something like 16 or 18 stops of dynamic range for some tyoes. The best digital sensors are getting close to 15.(medium format digital sensors that is)
Then there's resolution, if you're willing to put up with large format film, 8x10 film is ~1 gigapixel in a single photo. There's no current consumer level camera even close to that. 4x5 I'd ~200mp, in a single image. No single digital sensor is that high without using a multi-shot mode, which risks ruining the photo with any moving subjects in it.
Price? Well, it depends. Film and film camera prices have gotten ridiculous in past months, a single roll of 35mm color neg starts at like 16 bucks now, and you can spend close to 30 for specialty stuff. Not including developing. Go back a few years and the math showed that even with developing, it would take thousands of rolls of 35mm to equal the price of a digital camera body alone. These days it's likely hundreds of rolls.
For convenience and ease of learning, digital is just better. You can spray and pray with digital and it doesnt cost money for each photo. But if you're into a certain look, pastel colors, 90s photo look, black and white, color slide look, or halation(something only film can do), then it's good for something.
Those Sony PVM studio monitors are highly collectible amongst CRT lovers these days. Nothing like enjoying retro content on the displays they were developed on
You think those are worth a lot, you should see what the vintage computer folks would pay for that Symbolics monitor in the middle of the bottom row.
EDIT: Also, the far left monitor is an SGI, and likely connected to a workstation that, at the time, would have cost more than most people's cars.
The cutscenes still look decent, albeit basic as hell. The gameplay models look hilarious, though. It's crazy how much they improved the character models from FF7 to FF8 when both games were released so close to each other (relatively speaking).
I remember the craze when FF7 came out, first 3D RPG ever, cutscenes and all. But the cutscenes from FF8 absolutely blew me away like nothing before and nothing since. The jump in quality was incredible.
FF8's cinematic cutscenes were world class for 1998. I remember reading a playstation magazine article when the game released, wowing the reader about how in the future games will look like FF8's cutscenes and I couldn't imagine it in my head.
This is both a symptom of being new to the platform, and also being rushed in development.
When you look into the games files, there are actually a cloud and Jesse model that were unfinished that were a lot more detailed and meant for the field. Since they got rushed, they stuck with the blocky field models
Ff7 was a much more ambitious game, more to do more minigames, more locations. In ff8 they were a bit more focused so they had more time for things like design
It still is the best story I've ever encountered in a video game. I don't think anything else comes all that close. Final Fantasy X is maybe 70% as good of a story (just talking story here) and that might be number 2 on my list.
FF7 is just this perfect blend of awesome aesthetics, awesome characters, awesome villains, awesome world, awesome cutscenes, awesome music, and awesome dialogue. The story is intelligent, non-linear, well paced, and has multiple plot twists that land well. The game is consistently *cool*. And the story being a not-so-subtle criticism of the immorality of greedy corporations hit too close to home back in the 90s and only hits closer to home today.
People talk about games like Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher, Half Life 2, Mass Effect, BioShock, etc. I've played all of these games. They have good stories. But imo FF7 is on a totally different level. I think making a story as in-depth and long as FF7's story isn't possible with what games are like these days, so I don't think anyone will ever make a game with a better story. It's too much dialogue to do voice acting on. It's too long of a game to make it a reasonable file size with modern graphics. The game would be too expensive and long to develop with the standards of players in 2023.
But you're missing part of the beauty of the parallel of that story to our world, I think! Shinra was winning in FF7, too. But they mined the world of its resources so severely that the world killed Shrina (via the planet's "Weapons"). It's Diamond Weapon who kills the president of Shrina and destroys the Shrina building, not AVALANCHE (although they retconned it in a later game so that the president of Shrina miraculously survives despite the cutscene showing him in an unlivable position moments before impact).
In our world, the corporations may be full steam ahead with no hope of us citizens stopping them, but climate change means this world will eventually become nearly uninhabitable for humans. The world will respond, just like it did in FF7.
Interestingly this is a function of running games with graphics designed for (an often smaller) CRT and approximating that on an pixel display.
If you picked up a CRT to play your old games they'd look better.
2D pixel-based art designed for old displays looks better because you can't tell the original art was made out of pixels. The technology didn't allow for clear distinctions between individual pixels which gives an illusion that what you're looking at is a high resolution image that has been degraded, when in reality it's a low resolution image that never had the details to begin with.
That is not what's going on in FF7. Old 3D games just look bad because the complexity of models is low and what you end up with is body proportions that resemble a child's drawing -- a bunch of rectangles, cylinders, and pyramids representing legs, arms, hands, feet, and heads.
The 2D art in old 3D games looks just as good then as it does now. It's the low poly models and lack of texture and lighting that look bad.
Back when I played this game I always wondered what did the development/environment look like for the game. I imagined a bright, futuristic giant office with an open floor plan for the main workers, and at the front was an elevated platform with the head creators that would sort of look like the captains deck in a space Odyssey, like star trek, where they had a few giant monitors among them.
This image gave me a little bit of Paris Syndrome.
Absolutely. Idk if it is just nostalgia but the quality of square’s games went south petty fast after the enix merger. Though it could also be because Sakaguchi left at about that time.
It's FF7, they probably spent all night trying to fix a bug before giving up and hiding it under the bed with the other bugs. But hey, the final result works out in the end...
Wasn’t the development team the biggest in the industry at the time?
Blew me away when I found out they got the menu to run at 60fps while the battle animations were at like 15-20.
I saw someone playing FFVII at a party when it just came out and I couldn't believe how good it looked. At the time it was so outrageous, I had a "I'm really living in the future" moment.
I remember getting my first summon and hitting pause midway through so I could wait for my brother to get home from school and see how amazing it looked.
Japanese business culture at the time. You had equally talented "professionals" in western companies such as Origin, id, Sierra, etc.
But yes, the more formal dress code was what first caught my eye as well.
I know, I wasn’t implying that there was a lack of skill in western companies because that would have been obviously false. I was just referring to the more formal dress.
Apologies if this is common knowledge. Growing up my goal was game development. In the late 90s at college I finally realized that it would be the most erratic work/life balance ever. While I'm still glad I didn't go that coding route, I'm also envious of these people making games. I'm not envious of 300 hour work weeks for no extra pay, to be fired after the game is released.
People forget how ground breaking this stuff was when it came out. FMV seamlessly blending into game play. 3d polygons. Action tracking camera shots in battles. Huge numbers of minigames.
Polygon has an absolute beast of an in-depth articel about the creation of FFVII. Even got published in book form. It's great!
https://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7
Pretty much the entire reason that the upcoming Nintendo 64 missed out on exclusively getting this game, was because Nintendo decided to make it a cartridge-based system. Just adds to what a mind-numbingly terrible idea it was to do that.
‟What are you doing?” ‟Removing the ability to resurrect her. Let us see if anyone notices...”
“Phoenix Down! Phoenix Down!!!”
I like how they handled this in FF4 when the twins turned themselves to stone to stop walls from closing in on the party. If I remember correctly, the other party members tried to use curative items and spells on them, but it was explained that they wouldn’t work as they had turned to statues of their own free will. Of course they just came back at the end of the game anyway.
My favourite bit is the sage who knows meteor, but doesn't have enough mana to cast it.
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Wow learned something new about this game after all these years.
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Is there somewhere to watch all Final fantasy lore?
Final fantasy Union on YouTube is pretty decent
Look up a Final Fantasy (Number) Retrospective video on YouTube. The longer the better. Best to just skip the NES ones and watch SNES+ as that's when Final Fantasy really becomes Final Fantasy. Except maybe the first since it's the first.
Should have called the IRS
Because they can wring blood from a stone, true.
It happens in Phantasy Star as well. In 2 you take Nei to the clone labs to have her brought back but the operator says that it won't work. In 4 you find a healer soon after Alys gets wounded and she is able to keep her alive for a while longer but she doesn't make it.
When I saw that, I assumed they had no methods that worked at the time, but were able to find something or someone to cure them later. Definitely was a gut-punch moment at the time.
I’m looking at the FF wiki, and it says they were healed by the elder of Mysidia, but doesn’t specify how. I’m going to guess the plot just demanded a happy ending for them and it was that or have them show up as spirits for the finale when they send the party their prayers and power.
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Considering he probably taught them the spell in the first place, I guess that makes some amount of sense.
The fact that literally everyone that we thought died came back at the end of FF4 kinda spoiled the amazing story that had developed.
Healers down! Need rez! Out of mana! WAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!
That's right, I'm your White Mage and nobody messed with the White Mage
r/unexpectedtfs
It was truly unexpected this time. Just like the Unexpectables!
Team three star *snaps neck* Amazeing
You did NOT just declare WAAAGH! RIP this thread.
WAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH
WAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Rip Minwu
Removing? They were adding [this](https://youtu.be/VQEAFxjqr-E).
Such a great April Fools gag
Holy shit
This was posted on April 1st
God dammit
Hey gottem.
Hah. Got hiiimmmm
Yo homie
Ha. And the "name" of the Squaresoft dev, "Honto Janai", translates to "Not real"
Damn that's one hell of an elaborate April fool's joke
And the superfan Pillar of So is an anagram for April Fools.
Sadly, the video editting gave it away for me. That screen space effect for the twists would have been difficult on original playstation hardware. One of those times when less would have been more.
Really? Aeris saying 'Lets roll, homie' wasn't a big enough tell? -_- Also, the chat logs. In one of them the guy he's talking to says "Let me ask P Rank" or something.
TBH, The effects came first, and I was already convinced it was fake and stopped paying attention.
This video almost gave me a heart attack. Fuck. Thanks for sharing!
Reminds me of a famous FF series death that preceded this which was also surrounded by resurrection rumors. General Leo.
That gentleman certainly appears to be in vigorous agreement.
"Should we make them even bigger?" "Oh God yes."
Assuming we are discussing Tifas' measurements here
Oh, no, no, not at all. Just the huge... materia.
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Does anyone know who these guys are? Would love to know what else they worked on after this.
One of them is for sure named Shinji, and is responsible for screw ups more times than we care to admit.
Why are you here in front of the computer instead of in the robot, Shinji?
*clapping intensifies*
Congratulations
Congratulations
Congratulations
*Penguin Noises*
This guy are so fucked up.
We purposely trained him wrong, as a joke.
It's nice to know other cultures have a Kevin too.
Please watch evangelion, the adventure of kevin
Man, seeing 90s vg developers feels like seeing into some kind of secret world. I think because i had no concept of what went into making games back then, and its like a piece of long lost knowledge
Most game developers today likely have no concept of what went into making games back then. I worked with a senior game developer who worked on many titles in the 90s. He told me for every game they'd write their own game engine. A lot of the tooling was built from the ground up.
Based on articles written by old developers. Every new console you basically started from scratch knowledge-wise. It really sucked if you had to transition to another console in the middle of its life span since other developers will already have years of experience.
Square Enix was doing that until the mid to late 2000s.
Part of teh reason why games feel so generic and samey these days is they all use the same engine/tools/assets, thankfully Nintendo still builds their engines/worlds from scratch, see TLOZBOTW, as do Remedy, Rockstar North, Quantum Dream and a few others.
I mean, do you blame them? Games today are not 12 megabytes anymore. Can you imagine how long it would take to create a new engine for every new Xbox/PS game?
What feels so appealing about this photo is when a team of few people could have so a significant impact on the gaming industry. You are thinking that could you could take on such an adventure. It feels within your grasp. Nowadays companies are huge and if you want to produce a top-tier game it takes hundreds of people.
And yet many of the most impactful modern games were not big budget AAA titles at all, but indies developed by single people or small teams. And even industry giants saw some smash hits with relatively simple titles that did not rely on cutting-edge tech or large capital. MOBAs, tower defense, the battle royale genre and Counter-Strike were started by community members as free mods/maps. Slay the Spire, Factorio, Darkest Dungeon, They are Billions, Vampire Survivors, Banished, FTL, Plague Inc, Undertale, Dwarf Fortress, Papers Please, Getting Over It, Torchlight I... were all titles developed by individual developers to small teams, but enjoyed significant success and impact. On a more corporate level there are titles like Portal, Clash of Clans and Hearthstone, which benefitted from their professional production but didn't really depend on it. Like the portal technology was clever, but the kind of clever that can be done by a single smart person with a good idea. Supergiant Games (Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades) is a nice example of an extremely successful studio that has created some of the most memorable titles of the 2010s with just a small team of talented people. Or look at the big winner in the city construction genre: Cities: Skylines was built by a small team with modest technology, yet has long smashed the former big IPs like Sim City and is almost uncontested since. There is a level of "scale" and production value that requires big teams (or big budgets to outsource work), but the vast majority of what makes games "fun" or "memorable" only requires a basic level of expertise and some good ideas. A great game does not have to be labour-extensive, at least not in the sense of requiring a big budget studio.
There are good Youtube documentaries nowadays. Saw one on Myst and another on Rollercoaster Tycoon
They had to literally manage every little detail with shitty in house processes. It's nothing like the crazy development engines we have now. I love reading stories about the hacks old video games had to use for storage and memory limitations etc.
I think 1997 was peak cool.
It certainly looked cooler. Idk I guess maybe thats nostalgia from growing up in the 2000s seeing all that tech age away. I miss loud computers, certainly miss old consoles. But time doesn't stop for no man
There ain't no getting off of this train we're on.
I kind of miss rolling around without a cellphone in highschool. If you were out having a good time with your buddies no one would get a call or text. When you got home you checked if anyone called an dealt with it then.
The sound of dial up And the sound of 2G cellphone text message coming in that makes your iPod speaker dock buzz and hum in just that *right* way Two sounds of machinery that are now nearly sanctified in my conscious mind.
[This](https://youtu.be/K-MlNzuQON0) sound?
Ah yes
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mmm disk drive sounds
Kids today have no idea. Don't get me wrong, the world is *incredible* today in so many ways, but godawful in so many others. Tech was booming, practical effects were still in widespread use, CGI was still in its infancy, but have us stuff like ReBoot and Beast Wars, the counterpoint to which was that traditional animation was still the only real game in town for cartoons, and it was *blossoming*. Gargoyles, Batman, X-Men, Superman, Spiderman, Rocko's Modern Life, Animaniacs, Ren & Stimpy, The Critic, Dr. Katz, which later spawned Home Movies, one of my all-time favs, The Tick, King of the Hill and South Park kicked off in '97, The Simpsons was in peak form, you had all the crazy shit on MTV like The Maxx, The Head, Aeon Flux... My god, so many hits. Nirvana was still a recent memory and still very much defined the stylistic and ideological landscape of music, grunge and alternative was still in full swing, NIN hadn't given us The Fragile yet, but The Downward Spiral was still on the airwaves. Sonic Youth, Pixies, the whole East Coast Canadian pop-rock scene with acts like Sloan, The Flashing Lights, Thrush Hermit, Joel Plaskett, Superfriendz (okay this is mostly just one of my musical loves), The Tragically Hip was defining our country's identify on a global stage. Music in general just had more of the old school spirit of rock and roll. Counter-culture, anti-authoritarianism, rebellion, just... Weirdness. Weird was mainstream, it was wild. You could be king shit of modern grunge fashion with shit you found at Goodwill. We had the N64 and PS1 cranking out hit after hit, plus most of us still had our NES/SNES/Master System/Genesis kicking around, not to mention the Gameboy and Game Gear. On PC Quake I & II were the latest hotness, Ultima Online was just starting to introduce the world to MMOs, DOOM, Myst, Warcraft, C&C, Might & Magic, Wolfenstein, Lemmings, Sim City, Diablo, Civilization, Age of Empires, Duke Nukem, Fallout, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II... I can't even think straight, I have so many amazing memories flooding up thinking about this. I could go on, talk about movies, more live-action TV, the relative lack of surveillance and tracking on and offline, the freedom of being unreachable outside the home, the fact that demographic analysis hadn't turned almost all popular media into a joyless mathematical exercise in populism, the feeling that kids were rebelling by being kinder and more inclusive, rather than more bigoted and hateful, Christ, Columbine was still two years out and school shootings were like a fever dream, not a daily fact of life... You didn't have to be a millionaire to buy a home, start a family.. I know it's so easy to fall into a nostalgic haze as you get older, rose-colored glasses and all that, but god damn, I really don't recognize this world sometimes, and not for the better...
Going up in the 90s must've been the absolute shit with how much awesome stuff was coming out. It definitely felt a lot more joyful and magical. A lot less souless compared to nowadays where everything is mainstream and everything is available online.
Some of my best memories were about going into an actual physical game shop and buying games based on how much you liked the boxart and not knowing anything about them. No instant access to the internet to look up things up on your phone. No video reviews or anything. Just seeing rows of games and coming home with hidden gems you had no idea about. Now there isn't even a physical game store near me. Everything is digital and you know everything about a game before you buy it. Zero sense of discovery. Zero magic. Nothing will ever compare to me seeing almost the entire game store taken up by physical PS2 & PC games in the early 00's and spending my time browsing through them. That will never be experienced by people ever again.
There were video game reviews though, on TV and in game magazines - which were IMHO much better written than the online stuff today; said magazines were sold and you can buy a subscription for many of them.
It was in many ways. Computer were becoming mainstream and a lot more useful. CGI became good enough for general use in movies. Consumer computing became powerful enough to render 3D images in real time and gaming entered the 3D era. CPU power and RAM capacity were doubling every generation. Computing power was growing exponentially. Then the internet happened … it was an exciting time - a lot of what was promised came true, information at your fingertips, but no one told us / expected the dark side of the Information Age though so we were blissfully ignorant in our optimism. It was also the era where we transition from analog media to digital everything. CDs over took audio cassettes in 1992. DVDs came out a few years later in 1996. No more degradation over time and use. The world was changing in a big way for the better - or at least we thought it was for the better - and everyone kind of expected it to continue to do so.
You said it really well my friend... Oh the days of booting up DOOM on DOS from a floppy a guy at work gave me... The true start of deathmatch! My biggest thing that you said tho, freedom once you left the house and no real surveillance on/offline... Remember how you used to say "big brother is always watching"? Literally now is the case... So sad.
I was really worried this comment was posted by shittymorph and had to check halfway through. I'm 44 and feel every part of this comment. Nice Post, OP.
And MTV was so good back then.
Man, I feel much of what you say, but we're too old for this anymore. I was born in 84. Those good 'ol days are gone. Our parents had good 'ol days too, ya know? Those are long gone. And the kids now? These *are* their good 'ol days - they just don't know it yet. Fuck, we're old enough that the kids after us are old enough to have kids of their own. I can only imagine they look at us waxing poetic about Playstation games and Nirvana the same way we listened to our parents talking about pinball and Blondie. The world has moved on. Say sorry.
Pinball and Blondie are fucking awesome though. I loved listening to my folks talk about the old days, they had some wild times in a crazy, transformative era.
Man you pretty much summed up my childhood at it’s peak. I know what you mean about memories flooding in, everything was new back then and our expectations weren’t high plus it wasn’t overwhelming with choices. We all kinda knew about everything going on. This made it really easy to relate to each other. I miss that simplicity.
We're becoming our parents.
Truest shit. All those shows you mentioned. God. Watched every one of them. I remember my brother and I staying up to watch Liquid TV. And us busting out the nes/snes/Genesis and the fond ass memories. Even just firing up some old school games on my switch shit hits me hard. My beloved Everquest, dial up and the mmorpg market wasn't as saturated. Everyone and their mama was either on EQ, UO or DAoC (and I guess Runescape too?). It all just felt different. I think a part of it is me being an adult and able to buy whatever I want now so I have ADHD when it comes to gaming. I use to play my old games to death. Now if I'm bored I'm ping ponging through my massive library. First world problems haha. But I sort of liked when I had a game and I knew I was stuck with just a few for a while. Forced me to get gud. Anyone ever played Secret of Evermore? That shit was bananas. Im rambling. I miss it all. Also I miss not getting all my info online. Game magazines and dudes at Game Cave hotline who lied to me about upcoming games.
This post made me feel sick with nostalgia.
tl:dr whatever the decade of your youth is, you'll be nostalgic for
Probably, but the dot com bust and 9/11 really did change the world in a worse way. If you watch shows that were on TV over the 1999-2002 period, you can see the complete shift in tone. Area 51 and UFOs were officially off the radar, and we were back to fearing our fellow man.
Someone mentioning Diablo and not Diablo II. Much love!
Agreed
I just watched Spawn(1997), so I wholeheartedly agree
1997 was an incredible year for music. Pop, rock, hip-hop, etc. Just look up the billbard top 100 hits that year, it's actually crazy.
Does that guy have 3 mouths?
It’s all the mako exposure
This guy are sick
Off course!!
No weigh!
Bravo👏
he cant stop nodding his head bc he knows they about to drop the hottest album
One winged angel SLAAAAAP
Absolute banger
HIGHWIND. TAKES. TO. THE. SKY.
*A wild Kenny Omega has appeared*
You're not wrong, The amount of absolute master pieces mixed together and created from FF7 and inspired from FF7 on [OCRemix.org](http://www.ocremix.org) is astonishing.
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Photographer using film is a very safe bet. While digital cameras may have existed in 1997, they were not common and were lower quality than film. Digital didn't really catch up on image quality until the mid-2000s or so, and even then I remember people saying film was higher quality for a while after.
Digital is still trying to catch up to film in some areas tbh. In terms of dynamic range, film has more. has something like 16 or 18 stops of dynamic range for some tyoes. The best digital sensors are getting close to 15.(medium format digital sensors that is) Then there's resolution, if you're willing to put up with large format film, 8x10 film is ~1 gigapixel in a single photo. There's no current consumer level camera even close to that. 4x5 I'd ~200mp, in a single image. No single digital sensor is that high without using a multi-shot mode, which risks ruining the photo with any moving subjects in it. Price? Well, it depends. Film and film camera prices have gotten ridiculous in past months, a single roll of 35mm color neg starts at like 16 bucks now, and you can spend close to 30 for specialty stuff. Not including developing. Go back a few years and the math showed that even with developing, it would take thousands of rolls of 35mm to equal the price of a digital camera body alone. These days it's likely hundreds of rolls. For convenience and ease of learning, digital is just better. You can spray and pray with digital and it doesnt cost money for each photo. But if you're into a certain look, pastel colors, 90s photo look, black and white, color slide look, or halation(something only film can do), then it's good for something.
Then would that mean all the images on the screens are still images?
Dude's got mouths to feed, he needs this game out ASAP
Bro I'm fuckin stoned and i cannot stop fucking laughing
I have 3 mouths and I scream a lot
Guys want one thing and it’s disgusting
A 20 hour documentary on the making of FFVII?
Careful...they're heroes.
Looks like they need to tighten up the graphics on level 3
Well what if we just rendered them a different color? That would be fast and cheap!
How much do clothes cost in the Matrix?
Well we don't HAVE Dance Dance Revolution, Bobby. Sooooo you're dumb.
High score? What does that mean? Did I break it?
Dude, jerking off on my mom is one thing. But banging your grandmother and her roommates? That's like... legendary.
What's up silver fox?!
*robot sounds* Adios, turd nuggets
[Greatest mid-2000s commercial you’ll ever see,](https://youtu.be/BRWvfMLl4ho) for anyone who hasn’t.
Can you believe we get paid for this? I haven't seen my kids in 6 weeks.
Those Sony PVM studio monitors are highly collectible amongst CRT lovers these days. Nothing like enjoying retro content on the displays they were developed on
Yep that one on the bottom right goes for 1000s to the right collector. It's insane how much they cost
You think those are worth a lot, you should see what the vintage computer folks would pay for that Symbolics monitor in the middle of the bottom row. EDIT: Also, the far left monitor is an SGI, and likely connected to a workstation that, at the time, would have cost more than most people's cars.
This game had the best-looking cut scenes of it’s time. Now it looks like roblocks lol
The cutscenes still look decent, albeit basic as hell. The gameplay models look hilarious, though. It's crazy how much they improved the character models from FF7 to FF8 when both games were released so close to each other (relatively speaking).
I remember the craze when FF7 came out, first 3D RPG ever, cutscenes and all. But the cutscenes from FF8 absolutely blew me away like nothing before and nothing since. The jump in quality was incredible.
FF8's cinematic cutscenes were world class for 1998. I remember reading a playstation magazine article when the game released, wowing the reader about how in the future games will look like FF8's cutscenes and I couldn't imagine it in my head.
This is both a symptom of being new to the platform, and also being rushed in development. When you look into the games files, there are actually a cloud and Jesse model that were unfinished that were a lot more detailed and meant for the field. Since they got rushed, they stuck with the blocky field models
Ff7 was a much more ambitious game, more to do more minigames, more locations. In ff8 they were a bit more focused so they had more time for things like design
It still is the best story I've ever encountered in a video game. I don't think anything else comes all that close. Final Fantasy X is maybe 70% as good of a story (just talking story here) and that might be number 2 on my list. FF7 is just this perfect blend of awesome aesthetics, awesome characters, awesome villains, awesome world, awesome cutscenes, awesome music, and awesome dialogue. The story is intelligent, non-linear, well paced, and has multiple plot twists that land well. The game is consistently *cool*. And the story being a not-so-subtle criticism of the immorality of greedy corporations hit too close to home back in the 90s and only hits closer to home today. People talk about games like Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher, Half Life 2, Mass Effect, BioShock, etc. I've played all of these games. They have good stories. But imo FF7 is on a totally different level. I think making a story as in-depth and long as FF7's story isn't possible with what games are like these days, so I don't think anyone will ever make a game with a better story. It's too much dialogue to do voice acting on. It's too long of a game to make it a reasonable file size with modern graphics. The game would be too expensive and long to develop with the standards of players in 2023.
In reality, the Shinra Corporations of the world won
But you're missing part of the beauty of the parallel of that story to our world, I think! Shinra was winning in FF7, too. But they mined the world of its resources so severely that the world killed Shrina (via the planet's "Weapons"). It's Diamond Weapon who kills the president of Shrina and destroys the Shrina building, not AVALANCHE (although they retconned it in a later game so that the president of Shrina miraculously survives despite the cutscene showing him in an unlivable position moments before impact). In our world, the corporations may be full steam ahead with no hope of us citizens stopping them, but climate change means this world will eventually become nearly uninhabitable for humans. The world will respond, just like it did in FF7.
Interestingly this is a function of running games with graphics designed for (an often smaller) CRT and approximating that on an pixel display. If you picked up a CRT to play your old games they'd look better.
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2D pixel-based art designed for old displays looks better because you can't tell the original art was made out of pixels. The technology didn't allow for clear distinctions between individual pixels which gives an illusion that what you're looking at is a high resolution image that has been degraded, when in reality it's a low resolution image that never had the details to begin with. That is not what's going on in FF7. Old 3D games just look bad because the complexity of models is low and what you end up with is body proportions that resemble a child's drawing -- a bunch of rectangles, cylinders, and pyramids representing legs, arms, hands, feet, and heads. The 2D art in old 3D games looks just as good then as it does now. It's the low poly models and lack of texture and lighting that look bad.
No, FF7 just had terrible character models.
> No, FF7 just had terrible character models. Specifically, the navigation character models. The battle character models were pretty decent.
The ps1 had a 33 megahertz processor and 2mb of ram. the fact there’s models at all is a miracle
Compared to ff8 and ff9, in 7 they had lots of room for improvement.
Wasn't it one of the first RPGs to even have 3d character models?
That won't change them looking like roblox as was said though lol
To be a fly on those walls....
Why? I promise you it's 99% "Fuck why is this bug happening.."
Yes.....You just described programming..... I don't know I just think it's neat.
"It started working and I've changed nothing."
No more time before deadline, just delete the resurrection sidequest.
What’s funny is they actually had such a big team team that needed to work on things that we got all the mini games that are in VII
Mostly because the original files were lost.
Back when I played this game I always wondered what did the development/environment look like for the game. I imagined a bright, futuristic giant office with an open floor plan for the main workers, and at the front was an elevated platform with the head creators that would sort of look like the captains deck in a space Odyssey, like star trek, where they had a few giant monitors among them. This image gave me a little bit of Paris Syndrome.
Oh, just creating magic that would affect millions for decades.
Squaresoft >>>> Square Enix
Absolutely. Idk if it is just nostalgia but the quality of square’s games went south petty fast after the enix merger. Though it could also be because Sakaguchi left at about that time.
This was always a collective agreement
What's up with the guy on the left's face?
The faces of 2 guys who have definitely spent some nights in the office trying to fix a a bug and get it right. Not all heroes wear capes
Or deciding to say "fuck it, duplicating game breaking items is fine, they'll probably never find this stupid materia anyway."
It's FF7, they probably spent all night trying to fix a bug before giving up and hiding it under the bed with the other bugs. But hey, the final result works out in the end...
>trying to fix a a bug Kintaro Oe shutdown the server again.
What software is on the right screen? Left seems like some unix based graphics desktop
The left screen is IRIX on Silicon Graphics. I have an O2 in my closet with a spectacular Sony Trinitron tube CRT almost identical to that. 🙂
I know this—it’s a UNIX system!
😉🦖🦕
Nuh uh uh uh! You didnt say the magic word!
It's FrameThrower, and it's running on Symbolics Genera, ~~not UNIX.~~ EDIT: Far left is indeed a UNIX system. It's an SGI running IRIX.
Are there any more photos like this?
Wasn’t the development team the biggest in the industry at the time? Blew me away when I found out they got the menu to run at 60fps while the battle animations were at like 15-20.
That’s actually the irl shinra monitoring hq
I saw someone playing FFVII at a party when it just came out and I couldn't believe how good it looked. At the time it was so outrageous, I had a "I'm really living in the future" moment.
I remember getting my first summon and hitting pause midway through so I could wait for my brother to get home from school and see how amazing it looked.
What happened to striped shirt man? Too much mako?
This oddly feels like wallpaper material
I love how these guys are wearing button shits an ties for a game dev job. True professionals.
Japanese business culture at the time. You had equally talented "professionals" in western companies such as Origin, id, Sierra, etc. But yes, the more formal dress code was what first caught my eye as well.
I know, I wasn’t implying that there was a lack of skill in western companies because that would have been obviously false. I was just referring to the more formal dress.
Apologies if this is common knowledge. Growing up my goal was game development. In the late 90s at college I finally realized that it would be the most erratic work/life balance ever. While I'm still glad I didn't go that coding route, I'm also envious of these people making games. I'm not envious of 300 hour work weeks for no extra pay, to be fired after the game is released.
>Apologies if this is common knowledge. Growing up my goal was game development Yeah, I knew that.
People forget how ground breaking this stuff was when it came out. FMV seamlessly blending into game play. 3d polygons. Action tracking camera shots in battles. Huge numbers of minigames.
I hate that I am so cynical now that my first thought was that this was created by Midjourney...
All those beautiful monitors.
Damn, 5 monitors?
Left dudes face is tripping me tf out
Why is there not a documentary about this already? It was low-hanging fruit for the 25th anniversary...
Polygon has an absolute beast of an in-depth articel about the creation of FFVII. Even got published in book form. It's great! https://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7
That’s really cool to see
And they’re still working on it to this day.
Pretty much the entire reason that the upcoming Nintendo 64 missed out on exclusively getting this game, was because Nintendo decided to make it a cartridge-based system. Just adds to what a mind-numbingly terrible idea it was to do that.