The view from a dorm.
Up front: I have never playedFinal Fantasy 7.
And I watched it a lot once it was out.
Tomb Raider was a proper cultural phenomenon.
People in newspapers wrote op-eds about Lara Croft and knock-off versions appeared on club flyers and all that jazz.
The game itself was a shock after all that.
It was dark and lonely and complex and fraught.
After that I bundle FF7 together with Metal Gear Solid.
Apologies if they came out at different times.
Mario 3 - no bones - was a legit blockbuster.
That advert pulling back to see a whole planet of chanting Mario fanatics was pretty much justified.
But Metal Gear and particularly FF7 felt very different, largely because I heard about them through different channels.
I heard about them from my film friends rather than my friends who played games.
I remember being shown a shot of a complex landscape from the game - a city?
Part of a processing facility?
Some blend of the two?
- from a friend who was into special effects.
), “games look like this now.”
Then he said: “Cinema and games are coming together.”
Coming together to form what?
Something weird and exciting and slightly incoherent in my mind, at least.
I didn’t much know what a modern RPG was at the time.
What I knew was what a friend had told me: this game had tons and tons of cutscenes.
Tons and tons of special effects.
I watched Final Fantasy 7 thinking it was the weird hybrid future of cinema.
It made me think about things that games hadn’t made me think about since Another World.
Film students were into it.
Again, newspapers were writing about it.
You saw clips on TV with news anchors trying to make sense of what that new thing was.
At the time I thought: wow, games grew up.
Stupid in so many ways.
But Final Fantasy 7 and Metal Gear Solid had certainly attended university, anyway: mine.
Precisely because you didn’t understand them or the context they operated within.
And so they come to me through the years as sheer perceptual radiance.
That’s Final Fantasy 7 to me.
Never played it, will never forget it.
