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The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy, has just joined the association as an honorary member. He considers our initiative necessary and welcome, and offers us his support by agreeing to become an honorary member of the association. There is no doubt that the support of such a personality from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
Born on November 25, 1962 in Hitachi, Japan, Hironobu Sakaguchi studied electrical engineering at Yokohama National University, but he and Hiromichi Tanaka dropped out in 1983, mid-year, to join Square. In this subsidiary of Denyūsha Electric Company, they worked part-time on the development of the company's first games, The Death Trap and its sequel on the NEC PC-8801. It was in September 1986 that Square became an independent company dedicated to games and more particularly to Famicom in 1987. Sakaguchi was then promoted to director of planning and development and now works full time; he notably designed 3-D WorldRunner and Rad Racer. But they did not meet with great success and the game designer began creating an RPG, encouraged by the Dragon Quest phenomenon. The project was not unanimously accepted within the company and he named Final Fantasy what was to be his last game before leaving to resume his studies. But the game sold 400,000 copies and gave birth to the most popular RPG series in the world, still today. Hironobu Sakaguchi will direct or supervise each episode up to the eleventh, but he also designed titles like Chrono Trigger and supervised numerous Square series like Front Mission, Romancing SaGa, Tobal, Parasite Eve and Kingdom Hearts. In 1995, he became president of the American branch of Square, then opened a computer graphics studio which contributed to the success of Final Fantasy VII, sold 9.8 million units and the second biggest success on the PlayStation. He continued to supervise the following episodes and notably produced Final Fantasy IX at the same time as he developed the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001. Very ambitious, the project proved too expensive and this commercial failure placed the company Square in great difficulty. Sakaguchi then left his position in 2002 but continued to supervise some projects of his ex-employer on a freelance basis, such as Final Fantasy X. At the end of 2004, he decided to found his own studio, Mistwalker. He first worked in collaboration with Microsoft, and notably created Blue Dragon, which brought together the talents of mangaka Akira Toriyama and composer Nobuo Uematsu, and gave birth to a franchise which thrived especially on DS. It was also for Nintendo that he produced The Last Story in 2011, the title of which is a nod to the work that made him famous. And with Party Wave in 2012, he radically changed genre and support, this surfing game running on iOS.
Rad Racer (NES, 1987)
Final Fantasy (NES, 1987-1990)
Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation, 1997)
Final Fantasy: Creatures of the Mind (2001)
Blue Dragon (Xbox 360, 2006-2007)
Party Wave (iOS, 2012)
And you, why not become a member of MO5.COM too?