In September 1986, Masafumi Miyamoto spun a software division out from his father's electrical contracting company and founded a new company with ten million yen in capital. He called it Square. He was twenty-nine years old. The purpose, as he explained it, was to make games for the Famicom, but the real idea was something less obvious — that games should be made by teams. Not lone programmers. Teams of graphic designers, writers, and programmers, each playing to their strengths.
Miyamoto had graduated from Waseda University in 1983 with a computer science background. He had worked in his father's company, Den-Yu-Sha, running the software division in Yokohama. The company made electrical contracting equipment, not entertainment. The software division was small and the work was constrained. But Miyamoto had been thinking about how games were made, and what he saw did not make sense to him. Most studios at the time were built around a single strong programmer who did everything — code, art direction, story. Miyamoto thought that was a waste. If you wanted better art, hire an artist. If you wanted better stories, hire a writer. Let each person do what they were best at.
When Square became independent, most of the staff were part-time university students. Two of them, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Hiromichi Tanaka, would drop out of school to work full-time. Sakaguchi had been trying to make games for years and had not succeeded. Miyamoto put him in charge of a project that would become the company's last attempt at survival. The game was called Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi directed it. Yoshitaka Amano, a professional illustrator, designed the characters and the world. Nobuo Uematsu composed the music. Nasir Gebelli wrote the code. Each person did one thing well, and the game held together.
Final Fantasy was released in December 1987. It sold four hundred thousand copies in Japan. The sequel sold eight hundred thousand. By the time Final Fantasy IV arrived in 1991, the series had sold over four and a half million copies combined. Square was no longer a spin-off from an electrical contracting company. It was a studio that had defined a genre.
In 1991, Miyamoto stepped down as president. He left Square entirely in 1992, moving on to other interests. He did not give many public statements about why he left or what he felt about the company he had built. What is known is that he retained majority ownership even after leaving, and that when Square faced the possibility of a merger with Enix in 2002, his approval was required. The initial proposal valued Square shares at a ratio he did not agree with. He opposed it. The ratio was adjusted. The merger went through in 2003, creating Square Enix.
The structure Miyamoto had built — teams of specialists, each doing what they were trained to do — became the standard way games were made at Square and, eventually, across the industry. He did not invent collaboration. He did not invent the role-playing game. What he did was refuse to accept that one person should do the work of five, and build a company on that refusal.
He was gone by the time Final Fantasy VII sold ten million copies. He was gone by the time Kingdom Hearts became a phenomenon. The teams he had assembled, and the idea that assembled them, kept working. The question he left behind was not whether teams were better than lone programmers — the answer to that had become obvious. The question was: if you build something that works without you, do you stay, or do you let it go?