The heroic programmer of the first three Final Fantasy games says he’d ‘never seen an RPG before Final Fantasy’
Nasir Gebelli was an Iranian-American programmer who came to Japan on a work visa to work for Square in the late 80s and early 90s, where he was instrumental in creating the Final Fantasy series. Code Gebelli is so revered that John Romero called it “my number one programming god, my idol” in the book Honoring Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers. He is responsible for Final Fantasy 3’s airship, which flies over the world map so fast that other programmers have been unable to recreate it.
After working on Secret of Mana, Gebelli retired, making rare public appearances, such as when Romero interviewed him at the 1998 Apple II reunion. However, he recently spoke with NHK World, as spotted by GamesRadar, and talked about his time. on the square. Prior to this, Gebelli had worked primarily on action games for the Apple II, such as Gorgon, a clone of 1981’s Defender. Going from that to the NES wasn’t as big of a leap as you might think.
Japanese National Television managed to find and give a rare interview with Nasir Gebelli, the brilliant Iranian-American programmer who wrote the first Final Fantasy game! #FinalFantasyHe oversaw the programming of the first three Final Fantasy games. What a legend! pic.twitter.com/GnGkWeLeTnJanuary 11, 2025
“I thought it was very similar to what I did for Apple,” Gebelli said, “same processor, and I already knew almost every machine code for that processor.” Both were powered by the MOS Technology 6502, the workhorse of many 1980s home computers and consoles. “So from a programming perspective it was pretty simple. No training was required. But I had never seen an RPG until Final Fantasy came along.”
In the 1980s, games like Ultima and Wizardry were much more niche than today’s role-playing games, although Dragon Quest was successful enough in Japan that Hironobu Sakaguchi was able to convince Square to let him lead development of the game that became Final Fantasy. Lack of experience with the genre probably wasn’t such a hindrance, since they helped lay the foundations for it. “It was a challenge,” Gebelli said, “but at the same time it was exciting to be able to do something new. It was also fun to work with the team, especially Sakaguchi-san.”
At the end of the interview, Gebelli sits down at the TV and plays Final Fantasy. The airship rushes forward. He looks at it thoughtfully, then suggests that it might look better “if it were just 10% slower.”
You can watch more footage from the documentary entitled Legendary Games Chronicle: Final Fantasy in English on the NHK World website.