 Hirunobu Sakaguchi was tired. He'd been tired for a very long time now. Working as a games developer wasn't going the way he'd hoped. It was stressful, time consuming, low paid, and finding success was incredibly difficult. His small team were working on an ambitious fantasy role-playing game, but even his bosses didn't think it was going to succeed. And so Hirunobu decided to go out with a bang. If this game didn't bring the success he'd been striving for, he'd quit games development and go back to university. Little did Hirunobu know that this one last game, this final fantasy, would define an entire genre of video games for decades to come. University hadn't agreed with Hirunobu Sakaguchi. His degree in electrical engineering had seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect it didn't suit him particularly well. Frustrated and annoyed, he dropped out mid-semester, without any plan on what to do next. By sheer good fortune, Hirunobu stumbled into a part-time job at Square, a new video game studio that eventually began growing in size and popularity. For a while, things seemed like they were going exceptionally well, and Hirunobu saw himself promoted to the position of director of planning and development. Not bad for a college dropout. As the years went on though, it seemed that Square's initial success in the game's market wasn't necessarily an indication of things to come. The studio fell on hard times, as a series of flops hurt their profits, and their games failed to make the impact on the gaming market that the company hoped they would have. In spite of this, Hirunobu remained optimistic and dedicated to his job. He pitched an idea for an expansive role-playing video game to the higher-ups at Square, only to be shot down. Such an ambitious game was far too risky at this point in the studio's development. Over the next few months though, things only got worse for Square, and its employees began preparing for the worst. Without a big hit to support the company, things were looking grim. Then, something unexpected happened. A rival company, Enix, released Dragon Quest, which was exactly the kind of expansive RPG that Hirunobu had pitched to Square. As the studio executives saw the widespread popularity of Dragon Quest, they rethought their verdict on Hirunobu's game pitch. The team decided to greenlight the project in spite of the risk. After all, there was definitely an audience for this type of game, and at this point, what did Square have to lose? Hirunobu set to work immediately, but he soon found that this wasn't going to be an easy development period. Several other studios were also rushing to capitalise on the success of Dragon Quest, and while Square had approved Hirunobu's game, they weren't overly confident about its chances. Hirunobu was assigned a small team of seven Square employees to get the job done, while another game in development at the same time had over 20 people working on it. It also didn't help that many of the new team members were fairly fresh. The game's programmer had never programmed a game before, and had to figure out things as he went along. One designer, who was given the job of designing the game's battle system, had never even played a role-playing game, so without any understanding of how a combat mechanic should work, he based it on something he did understand, American football. Their little game was definitely an underdog. This was a point that Hirunobu stressed to his team regularly, as he attempted to motivate them by pushing them to outperform all of their competitors, including those within Square itself. The team decided to mix up the RPG video game formula by drawing heavy inspiration from pen and paper role-playing titles like Dungeons & Dragons. A large part of these tabletop titles was the ability to customize characters, and the option to work alongside fellow players, so Hirunobu's game allowed a party of characters that gamers could easily choose between. Each character had their own special set of powers and abilities, and the game featured an element system, where some enemies required certain specific magic types to overcome. This, the team hoped, would help set the game apart from all the other role-playing games that were flooding the market at the time. Hirunobu initially decided on the name Fighting Fantasy for his masterpiece. It seemed fitting, and crucially, it shortened to the letters FF, which sound really nice in Japanese. This name wasn't to be, though, as Hirunobu was soon informed that another company already held a trademark for a fighting fantasy brand. As the project wore on, Hirunobu found himself feeling less and less optimistic about his little game's chances. After years of work as a game developer, Hirunobu had absolutely nothing to show for all his hard work. He was no more respected in the industry than he had been on his first day at Square. And having never seen any of his games go on to become huge bestsellers, he was tired of wasting his efforts. Hirunobu decided to call it quits. He'd push his way through this one last game, and if it didn't see the success he was hoping for, he'd go back to school. At least with a life of drudgery as an electrical engineer, he'd be in a better financial position than he was at the moment. With this in mind, scratch the word fighting off of his game project. He was done fighting. This, instead, was his final fantasy, and he named the game as such. The team worked hard, and Hirunobu decided that if this was to be his swan song, he'd go out in style. He figured that he wasn't actually all that good at making video games. Instead, he was a storyteller. So as the game developed, Hirunobu put more and more emphasis on the game's narrative. He worked closely with the lead artist to create a beautiful, immersive game world that highlighted the story that Hirunobu was telling. As he worked as hardest, Hirunobu found his passion for storytelling fueled his enthusiasm for final fantasy. He began coming up with ideas for sequels and additional stories that he could tell, and decided that maybe he'd been hasty in planning to give up. If this new game solved well, perhaps he'd stick around after all. Of course, Square wasn't going to help the game to sell, unconvinced that this little game would perform well in a crowded RPG market, the company elected to print a relatively small number of cartridges. For Hirunobu, this wouldn't do. His game needed a chance to succeed. After all, this was his greatest achievement. After some persuasion, he convinced his bosses to double the order of cartridges, despite the enormous financial risk that this presented to the struggling company. Against all the odds, and to everyone's surprise, this gambit paid off in a big way. The game was selling, fantastically in fact. Hirunobu's little role-playing game had become the smash hit of the year, as hundreds of thousands of gamers rushed to play the new title. It wasn't long before the higher-ups at Square began knocking on Hirunobu's door, asking how quickly he could produce a sequel. With that kind of reaction, how could he say no? And so, Final Fantasy became one of the best-selling games for the Nintendo Famicom, and the series went on to define role-playing computer games for an entire generation. Every RPG that has come since owes at least some of its success to the Final Fantasy series, and the original game's impact on popular culture remains relevant decades later. The moral of the story is that nothing is ever over until the end. No matter how long you've been struggling with personal goals and challenges, don't throw in the towel early. It's better to go down swinging, like Hirunobu Sakaguchi, than to give up early and never see the success you deserve. Fight to your last breath for the things you want in life. If you're patient, and if you give it everything you've got, you'll succeed one day.