(Note: The images are for illustration purposes and not necessarily from the same sources as the quotes.)
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Interesting fact about Nasir Gebelli, the genious Iranian-American programmer who worked on FF1-3 and a number of other Square titles. It turns out that he's royal blood from Iran and moved to the US because of the Iranian revolution.
(The Madman's Cafe, 2015)
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- In 1983, Gebelli Software closed, partly thanks to the video game crash of '83. Gebelli took a break from games and traveled the world.
- Circa '85, he returned to California and visited Doug Carlston (CEO of Brøderbund), and saw the games that Brøderbund had released in Japan.
- A woman who worked with Brøderbund to distribute their games in Japan happened to be familiar with Square.
- She introduced Gebelli to members of Square who were in San Francisco at the time. They invited him to Square's headquarters in Japan.
- After arriving in Japan, he toured their offices with Masafumi Miyamoto (the founder of Square) and discussed his next move.
- He familiarized himself with their workplace and with programming on the NES for a month before deciding to sign a contract.
- When the team at Square learned that Gebelli had created games for the Apple II, they realized they'd actually long been fans of his work.
(GameDevHistory, 2017)
----------------------------------------
Square's president basically shoved Nasir at Sakaguchi and told him to take care of Nasir. Sakaguchi knew Nasir's previous works, but his overall impression of Nasir as a great programmer was overwhelmed by the feeling of him being a innocent but weird programmer. He kept doing wacky things like asking where the kimono girls were in Japan, and secretly throwing in easter eggs into their games.
(The Madman's Cafe, 2015)
----------------------------------------
Sakaguchi decided to make a Famicom Disk system game using Nasir's knowledge in 3D programming. That game was "Tobidase Daisakusen" (3-D WorldRunner). It bombed and Square's warehouse was left with piles of 3D glasses, leaving Sakaguchi shivering about what to do.
(The Madman's Cafe, 2015)
----------------------------------------
Gamasutra: Were you working with an Iranian programmer named Nasir Gebelli on Rad Racer?
Takashi Tokita: That's right. Back when NES developers were focusing exclusively on 2D graphics, he was the one who was able to simulate that perspective of the scrolling oncoming road. It was a very tricky program to write for that game system. We had only one programmer per game back then, so it was an asset to be collaborating with critical thinkers. The programmers at Square had that engineering mindset paired with strong personalities.
Nasir Gebelli was originally making games for Apple. [Hironobu] Sakaguchi was a fan of his work and that was how he was recruited to work for Square. I remember [Hiromichi] Tanaka, who's more recently been a central contributor to the design of Final Fantasy XI, would communicate with him in English back in the day. It was an interpersonal dynamic that seems to have anticipated our current climate of globalization in the industry.
(Gamasutra, 2011)
----------------------------------------
Kazuko Shibuya: With the race track in Rad Racer, being a 3D game, the way it was programmed is that it didn't display single sprites, but rather drew the graphics line by line. Nasir would come by two or three times a week, and I'd end up sitting by him all day, pointing out how the courses should be drawn: "this part is grey, x pixels long, this part is red, y pixels long" and so forth. He'd sort all the pixels out in his head, creating a single racetrack.
—The sense of speed in Rad Racer was very impressive, I didn't know it was made that way. It sounds like Nasir didn't work at Square every day then?
Shibuya: No, he didn't. And whenever he'd come we'd end up going out for dinner that evening, so it was a drinking party 3 nights a week. (laughs) Usually Nasir, Hiromichi Tanaka, Hironobu Sakaguchi and myself would go out.
(4Gamer, 2013)
----------------------------------------
Hironobu Sakaguchi: I would like to work with him again! It was funny, Gebelli didn't speak a word of Japanese and we didn't have a translator. We'd go to a restaurant and no matter what he'd order ─ spaghetti or eggs ─ they'd always bring out steak.
(Next Generation, 1999)
----------------------------------------
"I was a huge fan of his," Sakaguchi said. "When the president bought him into the company, I was all 'Wow, it's Nasir, let me have your autograph!' It was the first time he had programmed anything like an RPG, though, so it was tough. I had to explain basically everything about how an RPG worked before we could begin. I'd say 'The character's hit points go down at this point' and he'd reply 'What're hit points? If he's hit, why doesn't he just fall down?' After a certain point, I gave up explaining everything to him and just said 'Don't worry about it, just code it!' Maybe he wasn't completely convinced, but he did a great job getting a lot of performance out of the hardware. He liked coding these software demos on the side and surprising people with them; he'd come up with something new every week or so. I kind of wished he would concentrate on work more, but his demos helped keep the staff motivated, so I couldn't complain too loudly."
(1UP.com, 2011)
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──船に乗ってコマンドを入力すると、なぜかミニゲームがプレイできたり、飛空艇が速くなったりと、いろいろウラワザも豊富でしたよね。
時田：あのミニゲームは、ナーシャが頼んでもいないのに勝手に入れてきたんです。突然やってきて「ハーイ。ミニゲームを入れたよ！」って。彼があまりにもうれし そうなので、誰も文句が言えなかったんですよ（笑）。でも、RPG初のミニゲームを採用したのは『FF』になるのかな？ ちなみに今回は、ミニゲームに加えてモ ンスター図鑑なんかも入れてありますよ。
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As some of you may know, when Final Fantasy II was originally released on the Famicom, one thing that was quite a popular topic at the time was the Ultima spell, which was very difficult to acquire, but was also practically useless.
Just to give you an idea of how useless it was, in the NES version of the game, Ultima was initially meant to increase its power relative to the level of other spells the caster had, but due to a bug, it caused the spell to do just around 500 damage at the most on a single target.
Baffled by how the series' most powerful spell ended up being so weak in its debut game, Iwasaki and other fellow developers spoke with Hironobu Sakaguchi, who directed Final Fantasy II, about how that ended up happening.
At the time, when Square tested the game out and saw the Ultima bug, it was definitely a problem, and Sakaguchi said "How did this happen? Fix it." However, the person that programmed it replied with the following statement:
"All of that legendary stuff, it dates back to an age that didn't even have proper techniques. If you were to look at such things now in the present's point-of-view, it would be natural that they look inferior. For this reason, it's a given that Ultima's abilities would be bad."
"As for those who struggled and ultimately acquired it only to find out that it's useless… well, that's something that often happens in life. So, I'm not going to fix it!"Naturally, Sakaguchi was rather irritated by that reply and said "whatever, just give me the source," so he could fix it himself. As it turned out, the programmer had ciphered the source, so he ended up being the only one who could do anything with it, and it was just left the way it was.
(Siliconera, 2014)
EDIT: Turns out this one wasn't Nasir. See this post below.
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Hold Up + Left + Start + Select, press Reset, then release Select to display the message "BY: NASIR" (Nasir Gebelli, the game's programmer). Presumably, he could have used this code to prove the game was his if a pirate were to remove the game's credits.
(The Cutting Room Floor, 2014)
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Hironobu Sakaguchi: [...] So for Final Fantasy II and III, our staff actually brought all the equipment, everything that was necessary to finish those games, to Sacramento, because (Gebelli) couldn't come back to Japan. [...] We finished Final Fantasy II and III in Sacramento, California. [Laughs]
(Electronic Gaming Monthly, 2008)
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When FF3 needed debugging but Nasir was back in the states for visa reasons, he told the devs what to fix in the program's hex code via phone call. He amazingly had his whole program memorized.
(The Madman's Cafe, 2015)
----------------------------------------
Nasir wrote games entirely in assembly language and did not save source code. He didn't even have a printer to look at his code! He wrote all his NES games on an Apple II and cross-developed them to the NES hardware. Even the SNES game, Secret of Mana, was coded on an Apple II, in 65816 assembly with no source.
(John Romero, 2017)
----------------------------------------
NeoSyrex: Hi, I'm a big fan of this game, as are a lot of people, so it came to me as a great surprise when I found out an Easter egg had just recently been discovered in the game. What you have to do is press R 39 times while holding the L and A buttons, then press R while pressing no other buttons. It apparently can only be done when the characters' weapons are out. What happens is the letters "NAS" appear on the characters' weapon gauges. I don't believe it has any effect other than this. It seems pretty certain that the significance of "NAS" is that they are the first three letters of the name of the game's lead programmer, the enigmatic Nasir Gebelli (who often goes by just "Nasir", as shown in the game's intro).
(GameFAQs, 2008)
----------------------------------------
Next Generation: How did you like working with Square Soft?
Nasir Gebelli: In the beginning it was a little complicated because of the Japanese way of doing things. When I wanted things, I had to wait for them to finish some data and that was the hard part. Once I get motivated, I want to finish things quickly, and with them I had to wait.
I worked with Sakaguchi on pretty much everything except Secret of Mana, and he understood me. He knew me better than anybody else, so we worked pretty well together. He knew what I wanted and what I needed.
(Next Generation, 1999)
----------------------------------------
Next Generation: What do you do these days?
Nasir Gebelli: Nothing, absolutely nothing. I did try to make a made-for-TV movie. Things didn't work out, and I got bored with it and canceled that project.
(Next Generation, 1999)
----------------------------------------
It's Nasir. #ProgrammedbyNasir
(Brenda Romero, 2017)
----------------------------------------
Interesting fact about Nasir Gebelli, the genious Iranian-American programmer who worked on FF1-3 and a number of other Square titles. It turns out that he's royal blood from Iran and moved to the US because of the Iranian revolution.
(The Madman's Cafe, 2015)
----------------------------------------
- In 1983, Gebelli Software closed, partly thanks to the video game crash of '83. Gebelli took a break from games and traveled the world.
- Circa '85, he returned to California and visited Doug Carlston (CEO of Brøderbund), and saw the games that Brøderbund had released in Japan.
- A woman who worked with Brøderbund to distribute their games in Japan happened to be familiar with Square.
- She introduced Gebelli to members of Square who were in San Francisco at the time. They invited him to Square's headquarters in Japan.
- After arriving in Japan, he toured their offices with Masafumi Miyamoto (the founder of Square) and discussed his next move.
- He familiarized himself with their workplace and with programming on the NES for a month before deciding to sign a contract.
- When the team at Square learned that Gebelli had created games for the Apple II, they realized they'd actually long been fans of his work.
(GameDevHistory, 2017)
----------------------------------------
Square's president basically shoved Nasir at Sakaguchi and told him to take care of Nasir. Sakaguchi knew Nasir's previous works, but his overall impression of Nasir as a great programmer was overwhelmed by the feeling of him being a innocent but weird programmer. He kept doing wacky things like asking where the kimono girls were in Japan, and secretly throwing in easter eggs into their games.
(The Madman's Cafe, 2015)
----------------------------------------
Sakaguchi decided to make a Famicom Disk system game using Nasir's knowledge in 3D programming. That game was "Tobidase Daisakusen" (3-D WorldRunner). It bombed and Square's warehouse was left with piles of 3D glasses, leaving Sakaguchi shivering about what to do.
(The Madman's Cafe, 2015)
----------------------------------------
Gamasutra: Were you working with an Iranian programmer named Nasir Gebelli on Rad Racer?
Takashi Tokita: That's right. Back when NES developers were focusing exclusively on 2D graphics, he was the one who was able to simulate that perspective of the scrolling oncoming road. It was a very tricky program to write for that game system. We had only one programmer per game back then, so it was an asset to be collaborating with critical thinkers. The programmers at Square had that engineering mindset paired with strong personalities.
Nasir Gebelli was originally making games for Apple. [Hironobu] Sakaguchi was a fan of his work and that was how he was recruited to work for Square. I remember [Hiromichi] Tanaka, who's more recently been a central contributor to the design of Final Fantasy XI, would communicate with him in English back in the day. It was an interpersonal dynamic that seems to have anticipated our current climate of globalization in the industry.
(Gamasutra, 2011)
----------------------------------------
Kazuko Shibuya: With the race track in Rad Racer, being a 3D game, the way it was programmed is that it didn't display single sprites, but rather drew the graphics line by line. Nasir would come by two or three times a week, and I'd end up sitting by him all day, pointing out how the courses should be drawn: "this part is grey, x pixels long, this part is red, y pixels long" and so forth. He'd sort all the pixels out in his head, creating a single racetrack.
—The sense of speed in Rad Racer was very impressive, I didn't know it was made that way. It sounds like Nasir didn't work at Square every day then?
Shibuya: No, he didn't. And whenever he'd come we'd end up going out for dinner that evening, so it was a drinking party 3 nights a week. (laughs) Usually Nasir, Hiromichi Tanaka, Hironobu Sakaguchi and myself would go out.
(4Gamer, 2013)
----------------------------------------
Hironobu Sakaguchi: I would like to work with him again! It was funny, Gebelli didn't speak a word of Japanese and we didn't have a translator. We'd go to a restaurant and no matter what he'd order ─ spaghetti or eggs ─ they'd always bring out steak.
(Next Generation, 1999)
----------------------------------------
"I was a huge fan of his," Sakaguchi said. "When the president bought him into the company, I was all 'Wow, it's Nasir, let me have your autograph!' It was the first time he had programmed anything like an RPG, though, so it was tough. I had to explain basically everything about how an RPG worked before we could begin. I'd say 'The character's hit points go down at this point' and he'd reply 'What're hit points? If he's hit, why doesn't he just fall down?' After a certain point, I gave up explaining everything to him and just said 'Don't worry about it, just code it!' Maybe he wasn't completely convinced, but he did a great job getting a lot of performance out of the hardware. He liked coding these software demos on the side and surprising people with them; he'd come up with something new every week or so. I kind of wished he would concentrate on work more, but his demos helped keep the staff motivated, so I couldn't complain too loudly."
(1UP.com, 2011)
----------------------------------------
──船に乗ってコマンドを入力すると、なぜかミニゲームがプレイできたり、飛空艇が速くなったりと、いろいろウラワザも豊富でしたよね。
時田：あのミニゲームは、ナーシャが頼んでもいないのに勝手に入れてきたんです。突然やってきて「ハーイ。ミニゲームを入れたよ！」って。彼があまりにもうれし そうなので、誰も文句が言えなかったんですよ（笑）。でも、RPG初のミニゲームを採用したのは『FF』になるのかな？ ちなみに今回は、ミニゲームに加えてモ ンスター図鑑なんかも入れてありますよ。
(Dengeki Online, 2004)Google Translate said:
----------------------------------------
Just to give you an idea of how useless it was, in the NES version of the game, Ultima was initially meant to increase its power relative to the level of other spells the caster had, but due to a bug, it caused the spell to do just around 500 damage at the most on a single target.
Baffled by how the series' most powerful spell ended up being so weak in its debut game, Iwasaki and other fellow developers spoke with Hironobu Sakaguchi, who directed Final Fantasy II, about how that ended up happening.
At the time, when Square tested the game out and saw the Ultima bug, it was definitely a problem, and Sakaguchi said "How did this happen? Fix it." However, the person that programmed it replied with the following statement:
"As for those who struggled and ultimately acquired it only to find out that it's useless… well, that's something that often happens in life. So, I'm not going to fix it!"
(Siliconera, 2014)
EDIT: Turns out this one wasn't Nasir. See this post below.
----------------------------------------
Hold Up + Left + Start + Select, press Reset, then release Select to display the message "BY: NASIR" (Nasir Gebelli, the game's programmer). Presumably, he could have used this code to prove the game was his if a pirate were to remove the game's credits.
(The Cutting Room Floor, 2014)
----------------------------------------
Hironobu Sakaguchi: [...] So for Final Fantasy II and III, our staff actually brought all the equipment, everything that was necessary to finish those games, to Sacramento, because (Gebelli) couldn't come back to Japan. [...] We finished Final Fantasy II and III in Sacramento, California. [Laughs]
(Electronic Gaming Monthly, 2008)
----------------------------------------
When FF3 needed debugging but Nasir was back in the states for visa reasons, he told the devs what to fix in the program's hex code via phone call. He amazingly had his whole program memorized.
(The Madman's Cafe, 2015)
----------------------------------------
Nasir wrote games entirely in assembly language and did not save source code. He didn't even have a printer to look at his code! He wrote all his NES games on an Apple II and cross-developed them to the NES hardware. Even the SNES game, Secret of Mana, was coded on an Apple II, in 65816 assembly with no source.
(John Romero, 2017)
----------------------------------------
NeoSyrex: Hi, I'm a big fan of this game, as are a lot of people, so it came to me as a great surprise when I found out an Easter egg had just recently been discovered in the game. What you have to do is press R 39 times while holding the L and A buttons, then press R while pressing no other buttons. It apparently can only be done when the characters' weapons are out. What happens is the letters "NAS" appear on the characters' weapon gauges. I don't believe it has any effect other than this. It seems pretty certain that the significance of "NAS" is that they are the first three letters of the name of the game's lead programmer, the enigmatic Nasir Gebelli (who often goes by just "Nasir", as shown in the game's intro).
(GameFAQs, 2008)
----------------------------------------
Next Generation: How did you like working with Square Soft?
Nasir Gebelli: In the beginning it was a little complicated because of the Japanese way of doing things. When I wanted things, I had to wait for them to finish some data and that was the hard part. Once I get motivated, I want to finish things quickly, and with them I had to wait.
I worked with Sakaguchi on pretty much everything except Secret of Mana, and he understood me. He knew me better than anybody else, so we worked pretty well together. He knew what I wanted and what I needed.
(Next Generation, 1999)
----------------------------------------
Next Generation: What do you do these days?
Nasir Gebelli: Nothing, absolutely nothing. I did try to make a made-for-TV movie. Things didn't work out, and I got bored with it and canceled that project.
(Next Generation, 1999)
----------------------------------------
It's Nasir. #ProgrammedbyNasir
(Brenda Romero, 2017)
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