Wizardry has been the talk of the town lately — but let’s not forget that other long-lived role-playing game franchise programmed by an Apple II software developer.
No, not Ultima. The other other RPG franchise: Final Fantasy.
Developed by Square and originally released for the Nintendo Famicom video game console in 1987, the first Final Fantasy was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and programmed by Nasir Gebelli. Prior to joining the Square team in Japan, Gebelli was a prolific Apple II software developer, having written a dozen games between 1980 and 1982 for Sirius Software and his own company, Gebelli Software. Among his titles were Gorgon (inspired by the arcade game Defender), Space Eggs (inspired by Moon Cresta), Firebird, and Zenith.
Sakaguchi, along with Square alumnus Ken Narita and Square artist Kazuko Shibuya, were recently interviewed on J-WAVE 83.1 FM radio. Among the memories they shared were those of Nasir Gebelli:
Before the NES, he had been programming on a weaker machine, the Apple II, so he was very inventive. He was casually doing things that we would never have even thought of. That’s why he was the perfect programmer for the NES … It’s a slow computer. So, if you reduced the number of instructions as much as possible, you could make it run faster. Gebelli was very good at this.
Former Square programmer Ken Narita
One of my favorite fun facts about Final Fantasy is how Gebelli went about calculating “random” numbers: he hardcoded a table of 256 numbers for the game to use in sequential order.
The above chart is courtesy Kevin Zurawel’s talk, “Game Development in Eight Bits“.
Radio recollections are great — but what about hearing from the legend himself? The most recent interview with Nasir Gebelli that I’m aware of was conducted in 1998 by fellow Apple II alumnus and KansasFest 2012 keynote speaker John Romero.
(Correction: Gebelli was also interviewed in 2017 on three consecutive episodes of the Apple Time Warp podcast, starting with episode three.)
… So when are we getting an Apple II port of Final Fantasy?
(Hat tip to Verity Townsend of Automaton West)