Square / Square Enix

History

Square's origins lie inside a different company entirely. In September 1983, a division of Den-yu-sha — a Japanese electrical engineering contractor — began developing software under the name Square. The division's early output was modest: a handful of PC titles for the NEC PC-88 and FM-7 platforms. In September 1986, Square separated from Den-yu-sha and incorporated as an independent company. At the same moment, Hironobu Sakaguchi — born November 25, 1962 — was overseeing a game he expected would be his last. The company was struggling, money was short, and Sakaguchi intended to return to university if the title failed. He named it Final Fantasy. The game was released on December 18, 1987, selling more than four hundred thousand copies in Japan. Sakaguchi did not return to university.

The name Final Fantasy has an origin story that Sakaguchi himself, in a 2022 interview, described differently from the version that had long circulated. The commonly told account — that the title referred to the game being Square's last attempt before bankruptcy, or Sakaguchi's farewell to the industry — was, by his own account, not quite accurate. What is documented is that a young player sent Square a postcard after the game's release, proposing that 'Final Fantasy' meant 'the ultimate fantasy' — the Japanese word 究極 — and that interpretation, rather than the company's circumstances, shaped how the name came to be understood. The name outlasted the circumstances that prompted it. Within five years, Final Fantasy was one of the most recognizable titles in Japanese popular culture.

On the other side of what would later become a merger, Enix had arrived at the RPG market by a different route. Yasuhiro Fukushima founded the company in September 1975 — then named Eidansha Boshu Service Center, a real estate recruitment publisher — before renaming it Enix Corporation in August 1982 and pivoting to software. The pivot took a distinctive form: rather than building an internal development team, Enix ran programming contests, identifying external talent and publishing their work. Through this method the company discovered Koichi Nakamura and Yuji Horii, who designed Dragon Quest, released on May 27, 1986 — seven months before Final Fantasy. Dragon Quest enlisted character artist Akira Toriyama, who had been drawing Dragon Ball, and composer Koichi Sugiyama, a conductor and composer who had worked in advertising and television. The combination of Horii's design, Toriyama's art, and Sugiyama's orchestral score created a template for the Japanese RPG that would shape every title in the genre for the following decade.

Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the Super Famicom became the primary stage for both companies. Square produced Final Fantasy IV (1991), Final Fantasy V (1992), and Final Fantasy VI (1994); Enix published Dragon Quest V (1992) and Dragon Quest VI (1995). In 1995 Square collaborated with Nintendo and Enix to produce Chrono Trigger — a single-platform RPG designed by what the team called the Dream Team: Horii, Toriyama, Final Fantasy creator Sakaguchi, composer Nobuo Uematsu, and programmer Kazuhiko Aoki. It sold over 2.5 million copies in Japan. The shop owner who keeps this museum remembers DQ on Super Famicom and PlayStation as something that felt like it might never end: the scale kept expanding, the world kept opening. 'The PlayStation DQ was so epic in scale, I thought there was no end to it. The progress of technology and the game world was astonishing.' That sense of a world without a visible horizon — of narrative scale matching hardware ambition — was what both companies had been building toward, in parallel, for nearly a decade.

The most commercially decisive moment in Square's history arrived on January 31, 1997, with the release of Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation. Developed over three years with a staff that had more than doubled from previous titles, the game sold over two million copies in Japan within three days and reached ten million on PlayStation worldwide; the total across all platforms eventually exceeded fifteen million. It was the game that made the PlayStation the dominant home console in Japan during its generation, and the game that proved to Western markets that Japanese RPGs could sustain mainstream success outside Japan. For the shop owner who was drawn in by FF7: 'The graphics were nothing compared to today, but I was completely drawn in across the board.' The graphics were not the reason. The world was.

Square had become one of the most celebrated developers in the world. And then it built a film studio in Honolulu. Square Pictures, established in 2000, produced Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within — a fully computer-generated film with a budget reported at $137 million. The film opened on July 11, 2001, and earned approximately $85 million worldwide against its production costs. It was Square's first annual net loss since the company's founding. Hironobu Sakaguchi, who had directed the film, departed Square in March 2003. Square Pictures was closed. The circumstances that produced the loss were straightforward: a production that cost more than it earned, in a medium the company had not previously operated in. The departure of the man whose near-exit from the industry had named Final Fantasy closed a particular chapter. Sakaguchi later founded Mistwalker, where he worked again with composer Nobuo Uematsu.

On April 1, 2003, Square Co., Ltd. and Enix Corporation completed a stock-for-stock merger, with Square shareholders receiving 0.85 Enix shares for each Square share held — a ratio that reflected Square's weakened position after the film loss. The resulting company, Square Enix Co., Ltd., inherited both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy as flagship franchises, along with the publishing catalogues of both predecessors. In 2009 Square Enix acquired Eidos Interactive, adding Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and Thief to its library and establishing a significant Western publishing presence. The Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy franchises continued on new hardware generations: Dragon Quest IX (2009) sold over 4.1 million copies in Japan, while Final Fantasy XIV, released in September 2010, launched to such severe criticism that Square Enix made the extraordinary decision not to shut it down but to rebuild it entirely.

The producer assigned to reconstruct Final Fantasy XIV was Naoki Yoshida — born May 1, 1973 — who joined the project after it had already launched. In a 2011 interview, Yoshida described logging into the game for four minutes and fifty seconds before concluding that the architecture was beyond repair in its existing state. Rather than a patch, the team undertook what they called A Realm Reborn: a complete rebuild, launched on August 27, 2013, which became one of the most successful subscription MMORPGs in the world. The original version was shut down on November 11, 2012 — an event announced to players with unusual candor, acknowledged as a failure, and followed by a rebuild that succeeded. The company that had named its first major game after a condition of apparent ending, and survived; that had staked $137 million on a film and absorbed the loss; that had merged two competing traditions into a single catalogue — had now rebuilt a failed game from the foundation and released it again. The name it carried into the second attempt was the same name it had always held: Final Fantasy.