Hironobu Sakaguchi is a well-known Japanese game designer, producer, writer and former film director. He was born in 1962 in Hitachi, Japan. Although he started out studying to become an electrical engineer while attending Yokohama National University, he decided to drop out in 1983. He then began working for Square, which was part of Denyusha Electric Company at the time.
Square became an independent company in 1986 and Sakaguchi continued to work for them as Director of Planning and Development where he helped create games like The Death Trap (1984) and King’s Knight (1986) focusing on Role-Playing Games or better known as RPGs.
It wasn’t until he made the game Final Fantasy (1987) that got his recognition and became a huge success; leading into the expansive Final Fantasy series franchise we all know today.
While he continued to be the producer of this franchise, he also became a CG film director for the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001). The film itself wasn’t successful but it introduced photorealistic animated humans into the animation industry using computers.
Square then merged with Enix Corporation, becoming Square Enix in 2003. Soon after, Sakaguchi parted ways with them and with the help of Microsoft, opened his own studio known as Mistwalker in 2004. He continued to produce RPG genre games like Blue Dragon (2006) Lost Oddysey (2007) and most recently, Terra Battle (2014).
Sakaguchi’s phrase “The most important thing is to create a story that involves the player, who, when switching off the console, keeps thinking about the game” has given the spotlight he shines in as a video game designer by showing passion and focus on story/plot & character development which RPG titles rely on. He has received awards like the Hall of Fame Award from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (2000) and the Legend Prize at Gamelab in Barcelona (2012).
Works Cited
Barder, Ollie. “Hironobu Sakaguchi Talks About His Admiration For ‘Dragon Quest’ And Upcoming Projects.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 29 June 2017, www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/06/29/hironobu-sakaguchi-talks-about-his-admiration-for-dragon-quest-and-upcoming-projects/.
Bowman, N. D., Oliver, M. B., Rogers, R., Sherrick, B. I., Woolley, J., & Chung, M.-Y. (2016). “In control or in their shoes”: How character attachment differentially influences video game enjoyment and appreciation. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 8(1), 83–99.
Briceno, Gabriela. Hironobu Sakaguchi: Who Is, Biography, Style, Video Games, Movies, Phrases. 26 July 2019, www.euston96.com/en/hironobu-sakaguchi-en/.
“Hironobu Sakaguchi.” Giant Bomb, www.giantbomb.com/hironobu-sakaguchi/3040-633/.
Sobchack, Vivian. “Final Fantasies: Computer Graphic Animation and the (Dis) Illusion of Life.” Animated Worlds. Ed. S. Buchan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 179-180.
he definitely had great contributions to the game design industry. i played final fantasy when i was a kid and it’s great to learn about the original designer