Game industry history buffs should check out John Romero’s YouTube channel, because last month he published a recording there of himself interviewing game industry luminary Nasir Gebelli in 1998 about Gebelli’s career and time spent at Square programming the first few Final Fantasy games.
Devs may not be familiar with Gebelli’s work, since he basically retired from the game industry after wrapping up work on Square’s 1993 Super Nintendo game Secret of Mana.
Since then he’s rarely done interviews about his work in games (before going to work with Square he made a name for himself as one of the leading lights of Atari II game development) which is what makes the video Romero posted so interesting despite its age.
“Miyamoto introduced me to [devs at Square] and they asked me what games I had done; I told them I had done some stuff on Apple, and they said, ‘do you know Nasha’?” Gebelli told Romero at one point, recalling how the folks he worked with at Square knew him by his work — they just didn’t realize it at first. “I said what games? And they said ‘oh, Space Eggs,’ and I go ‘oh, I wrote that.'”
Clips of this interview have occasionally flitted across the Internet, but this 20-minute version is still well worth watching in full. Gamasutra took note of Romero’s YouTube work after seeing the veteran game designer tweeting about interviewing Gebelli today for nearly three hours. Romero is expected to publish video from today’s interview online in the near future.