Was reading the latest EGM (hey, it was free) and this part of an interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi jumped out at me: EGM: The arrival of 32-bit systems and Final Fantasy VII were real turning points for Square. Not only did Amano's artwork not take center stage- everything moved over to Tetsuya Nomura- but it was also a really exciting time; you guys left Nintendo behind. Can you recall what that era was like around 1996 and '97? NS: Yeah, that was a major turning point. We all remember when Final Fantasy made the move to the PlayStation platform. At that time, we knew the next wave in gaming was 3d, so there ws a lot of research going on. We spent an enormous amount of time researching our next big goal and how to achieve it. We purchased a lot of Silicon Graphics machines and did a mock-up of Final Fantasy using those machines-so there was actually a completed version of the first Final Fantasy using Silicon Graphics machines where you would control the characters with a mouse;... A lot of it is 'well known' when related to the FF6 tech demo, with the mouse control and all. But saying htere was a completed version of the first Final Fantasy, that is interesting to me..
I saw this as well, and was surprised by the information. Like you said Borman, I was aware of the FFVI tech demo with the mouse control, but never has a completed version of the first Final Fantasy been mentioned in the past. It would been interesting too see this in action, although I don't really know how much it would have differed from the FFVI demo..
The Final Fantasy SGI game demo (which was never officially called FF6/FFVI or 'Final Fantasy 64') would not even run on standard, low-end or mid-range SGI workstations (i.e. Octane, O2, Indigo, Indy etc). Final Fantasy SGI was only capable of running on their highend ONYX supercomputers equiped with at least the RealityEngine visualization systems. Think of RE as a super duper expensive graphics card for an expensive supercomputer. The graphics don't look that great today, they are less complex, less detailed than what a GCN or Wii can do, but still pretty high-res (above SD but below full HD). It had plenty of anti-aliasing , more so than GCN/Wii games.
The FF6 stuff is nothing new, the interesting part of this quote is that it is of the original Final Fantasy.
