Hiroyuki Ito

About

Hiroyuki Ito is a Japanese game designer, director, and producer at Square Enix. He graduated from Tokyo Zokei University and joined Square in 1987, starting at the bottom — as a debugger on the first two Final Fantasy games, then making sound effects for Final Fantasy III. For Final Fantasy IV (1991) he designed the Active Time Battle system, the mechanic that replaced static turn-based combat with a filling gauge and the constant, quiet pressure of time. As colleagues on the team have recounted, the idea came from outside games entirely: Ito had been watching a Formula One race, saw the cars passing one another at different speeds, and gave each character its own speed value. Square filed a patent for the system in 1991. He went on to co-direct Final Fantasy VI (1994, with Yoshinori Kitase) and Final Fantasy XII (2006, with Hiroshi Minagawa), and to direct Final Fantasy IX (2000) alone, and his battle designs kept drawing on professional sports — the Gambit system of Final Fantasy XII acts on the most likely outcome of a situation, the way a football play does. His name is far less known than the tension his gauge created in millions of players.