Kupo Chronicle #12 - Square New Millennium
On The Precipice Of Greatness
Welcome to the Kupo Chronicle, the premium edition of the Wark Digest newsletter, where we explore the Final Fantasy universe in long-form and drill down into unique moments of the series’ history. I’m Chris, aka Hoogathy, and in this installment we time-travel back to the year 2000, to hear Square’s bold (and perhaps over-ambitious) vision of gaming’s online future, including the simultaneous announcement of three new Final Fantasy games.
This week’s newsletter is 2464 words, a 12-minute read.
Before Time Compression
Even though I dig into Final Fantasy history every week, one thing still amazes me: how prolific the series once was. SquareSoft released the first 6 games within 7 years (1987-1994), hopped platforms, and released the next 5 mainline games, 1 major spin-off, and its first ever direct sequel within the next 6 years (1997-2003). The main series hit the brakes for FFXII’s troubled development, and by that point the HD era had begun, and development times ballooned.1
Putting out this many games so fast was a herculean effort, made possible by multiple, smaller teams on simpler hardware—but each of those games made a sizable step forward technologically. It’s not like the games were cookie-cutter clones of each other, either; each of them, especially in the latter half, reinvented the series’ conventions.
So tight was the space between them, in fact, that at one point Square actually announced three Final Fantasy games simultaneously. In purely hilarious Y2K-inspired fashion, they made the proclamation at a special event in Yokohama called the “Square Millennium Event,” held at the end of January 2000. If three new blockbusters wasn’t enough, either, they also shared an ambitious vision of the future of entertainment.
So, how accurate were Square’s seers, and did they live up to all their promises for Final Fantasy and the industry itself?
Ushering In The Millennium
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