The first world map in the Mana series was drawn by hand on graph paper. For the series’ 35th anniversary, three people sat down for an interview about those days: Koichi Ishii, who created the first game; Hiromichi Tanaka, a central figure behind Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana; and Yoshinori Kitase, who joined the first game’s development team as a newcomer.

The first game was FINAL FANTASY Adventure, released on Game Boy in 1991. Ishii also helped launch the FINAL FANTASY series. The interview was conducted during the filming of a roundtable, which went up on SQUARE ENIX’s official YouTube channel in September.

Kitase came from the anime industry. He had never made a game, so he applied with a video he made as his university graduation project. Tanaka remembers it as a Star Wars parody and says it was what got Kitase hired. For his first two to three months at the company, Kitase played FINAL FANTASY III and DRAGON QUEST IV and wrote reports on them. Then he was assigned to the Mana team.

Internal documents were all on paper up through FINAL FANTASY III, Tanaka says. Even after PCs became widespread, Ishii kept using graph paper. His explanation is that if he doesn’t put it on paper, he can’t get a bird’s-eye view of the whole game. Many of those paper documents are still kept in SQUARE ENIX’s archives.

Kitase worked with the programmers to turn Ishii’s map into data. His reference was the spec document Tanaka had written for FINAL FANTASY LEGEND II. It was hard for a beginner to follow, Kitase recalls.

After the first game, Kitase moved to the Romancing SaGa team and made maps there too. Asked how the two teams differed, he answered that the Mana series puts its emphasis on visuals. His examples were the Ring Command and Flammie’s flight, which uses Mode 7 on the Super Famicom.

Later on, Kitase was planning a Super Famicom FINAL FANTASY VII. According to Kitase, Chrono Trigger’s development was in a state of emergency, so he set that plan aside and moved to its team.

Kitase says Ishii took Mana from zero to one, and his own job was to take it from one to a hundred. He calls the series the starting point of his career in games.