http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7
Hiroshi Kawai
Character programmer, Square Japan
Unreal, in terms of graphics, it's very capable and very, very impressive. But it was still essentially in alpha stage when they were trying to push it onto us. ... And even the devs [at Epic], their attitude — I'm not saying this with any disrespect, but it was one of those, ”If you don't like it, don't use it" [situations]. Their devs were very clear from the get-go, saying, ”This is what Unreal's made for, and if it fits your needs, great. If it doesn't, you're on your own. If you need documentation, read the source code. If you need help, write us in English." ...
And while we were making a little progress on that front, we were running into personnel issues in terms of trying to hire people. Microsoft has this interesting sort of hiring scheme where, even if you say you had $100 million in your budget, you would be capped to this thing called ”headcount" and it would be completely independent of your budget. So you may only have a headcount for two full-time employees even though you have a massive budget, and you could not increase that. You'd have to essentially trade horses with some other team who's willing to give up their headcount, and even then it's still a precious commodity.
Yoshihiro Maruyama
Executive vice president, Square U.S.
We couldn't use Microsoft employees to complete the projects because their overhead was very expensive. So we had no choice but to create a separate company. ... It was a paper company just to hire developers.
Hiroshi Kawai
Character programmer, Square Japan
So it came to this point where it was like ... we just weren't going to get the people we needed within Microsoft, so it would be better to spin the team off into a separate company. But creating a company from scratch would be risky, so we would like to have somebody ‘sponsor.' And that's where they found Cavia, who was willing to take the team on and sort of be a sibling of our team. [Even then] it was very difficult to convince people to move over.
So despite having this new company ... we were just calling it NewCo at the time, before it became feelplus — and although we had this shell of the company to work with, we still couldn't get our devs. And I don't know who got wind of it first, but ... there was a role-playing game that was being developed by a company called Nautilus, who was a subsidiary of ... Aruze, who was primarily into pachinko games in Japan. ...
I think they were no longer interested in maintaining that team. They were saying, ”If anybody's interested in taking this team on, we're here to listen." And they had a full dev team there, and the dev team had been making role-playing games at that point. So the powers that be thought, ”Hey, why not just combine those guys with existing Microsoft guys and we now have double the capacity, so look out."
Well, unfortunately it didn't, because the guys from Nautilus — I guess they were kind of given the cold shoulder. I mean, they were essentially being kicked out on the street, although they didn't end up being on the street because we picked them up so quickly, but they were kind of treated that way, so they were very suspicious of the guys from Microsoft. And especially the devs were absolutely not interested in using Unreal. They were saying, ”You cannot trust code written by a third party. We have no idea what's in it. We won't be able to customize it." Yadda, yadda, yadda. So we have 10 engineers from Nautilus, 10 plus engineers from Microsoft, and they're not talking to each other.