Final Fantasy 1 programmer casually says coding the game was “pretty simple”

38 years ago, a game called Final Fantasy released on the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was the very first game in a series that still continues to this day. Back then, the programming and coding for the first 3 games was done by Nasir Gebelli. It is rare for Gebelli to participate in an interview, and has stayed out of the public eye for a long time.

Nevertheless, that didn’t stop him from making an appearance in A Japanese documentary called Legendary Games Chronicle: Final Fantasy, where he discusses his work on the original Final Fantasy games. At one point, he mentions that “I thought it was pretty similar to what I was doing for Apple in the same processor. I already knew just about every machine code for that processor. So as far as coding, it was pretty simple. There was no learning curve. But I’d never seen any role-playing games until Final Fantasy”.

Later on in the documentary, Gebelli played the original Famicom version of Final Fantasy 1 that was released in 1987. During his play-through, he eventually comes across an airship section in the game. It is during this part that he remarks that “actually looking at it, it could, visually, look better if it was at least, like, 10% slower”.

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