Hironobu Sakaguchi
There are many highly anticipated video games for 2012. 2012 marks the return of one of the most highly successful video game franchises of all time, Final Fantasy. But as Final Fantasy prepares to make its next big leap forward with the release of Final Fantasy VIII – 2, it is worth looking back at how the popular franchise came to be. For that, one needs look no further than Hironobu Sakaguchi.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise and he is one of the most ambitious, creative, and successful minds in the video game industry. Orphaned as a boy and then adopted, Sakaguchi had an unremarkable childhood in Japan. However, while studying at Yokohama National University, he became fascinated with endeavors more creative than the electrical engineering he was studying. At age twenty, Sakaguchi dropped out of college and joined the fledging software company Square.
It was at Square that Sakaguchi developed Rad Racer, a car racing game that Nintendo needed for commercial reasons to compete with Sega. While Rad Racer was a commercial success, it was not the type of project that Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted to develop. So, he developed Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy was a role-playing game that Sakaguchi developed for the Nintendo platform. He directed Final Fantasy, as well as conceived it, so his talents were embedded in every aspect of the game. Prior to the release of Final Fantasy, Sakaguchi decided that his video game career would live or die with the product; if the game was a commercial flop, he intended to return to the university and finish his education.
The video game players of Japan and the United States had something else in mind for Sakaguchi!
Final Fantasy was a break-out success and that success compelled Nintendo to request a sequel, which was released the next year, with Sakaguchi directing that game as well. With the success of Final Fantasy II, Hironobu Sakaguchi’s career was off to a roaring start. He directed three more Final Fantasy video games and now, after twenty-five years, he is directing again with the newest game he conceived, The Last Story. After Sakaguchi directed his last Final Fantasy video game, he continued to produce and develop other video games. At least fifty different video games include Sakaguchi in their credits!
Hironobu Sakaguchi transformed video games by infusing them with a richer sense of storytelling than video games had prior to the release of Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi was interested in developing characters in video games and telling stories. With that view of the potential for what video games could be, it is no surprise that Hironobu Sakaguchi dabbled in directing films following the success of his many video games. Unfortunately, his first major feature film, Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within was one of the worst box-office failures of all time.
Always resilient, though, Hironobu Sakaguchi today runs his own video game studio, Mistwalker, which provided some of the most successful games for Nintendo’s DS platform.
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