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Hajime Tabata was forced to own mistakes early into his career. A few weeks after the game designer joined Tecmo in the late 1980s, Yoshihito Kakihara, the company's eccentric founder, called his employees into his office. Kakihara was furious. The reviews of the studio's most recent Famicom game, Rygar, were in and they weren't good. The developers had neglected to include a save system, so reviewers had complained they'd had to leave their consoles on overnight in order to preserve their progress. Rygar had been in development while Tabata was still in college, yet he, along with every other Tecmo employee was ordered to visit the headquarters of each of the major Japanese video game retailers. On arrival, Kakihara explained, the staff must fall to their knees and issue an apology, followed by an assurance that their next game would be much, much better. It was, as Tabata puts it today, "harsh." The indignity also provided preparation for his directorship of Final Fantasy 15, a multi-million pound production that, across its slurred decade of development, has been beset with problems, many of which Tabata inherited from his predecessor. In August this year Tabata, doing his best to mute his irrepressible grin, sat in front of a camera and recorded a message in which he apologised to fans and retailers for yet another delay for the game, which will now launch later this month. Delays like these may infuriate consumers, but they have more tangible consequences for that constellation of businesses that buttress the launch of a major game - the advertisers, the retailers and so on. For Tabata humility, rather than braggadocio, is the preferred posture in blockbuster video game development, where the stakes are often high enough to dash a business that missteps, and where team morale can, over the endless months of toil, be sapped and spoiled.
A month after he made his apology, I visit Tabata and his team, who together occupy an entire floor at the company's glass-encased office in Shinjuku. There's a marathon-closing atmosphere in the studio, whose staff seem weary yet emboldened by proximity to their goal. "When you've worked for so long on something like this, the thought of launching with something that's in any way unfinished is terrible," says Tomohiro Hasegawa, an art director who has worked on the game since the earliest days, when it was directed by Tetsuya Nomura. "While we've had to apologise unreservedly to retailers for messing up their plans, we've been so thankful for the extra weeks."
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