Square says it unhip to be Nintendo!?
"Breaking up is hard to do!" SquareSoft is enjoying great success these days (the Final Fantasy games sell in the millions, and even the awful FF8 sold well) and they really seem to be a roll too, but hey, so is Nintendo (Gameboy Advance and Pokemon are also selling well). So why isn't Square making games for any Nintendo game system like the N64, Gameboy Advance, uh?? They made games for the Super Nintendo, right? It would seem like a perfect match, eh? One word, Sony!
When the new Ultra 64 (later named the Nintendo 64) game system was being hyped in 1996, Squaresoft was already on board preparing a new Final Fantasy for the next Nintendo machine. Thing's seemed to be going well between the two companies but that all changed when Sony made a deal with Square to release Final Fantasy VII exclusively for the Playstation. The deal was so good that Square wouldn't release any new games for the N64, Gameboy, Saturn, or any other competitor at all. Now that Square cancelled the N64version of Final Fantasy, this really hurt the N64 in Japan because RPG's were very popular in that country and the Sony Playstation enjoyed a great level success similar to that of the Famicom and the Super Famicom.
Square was now offically Nintendo's rival here in Canada too and Square even did an smear US ad saying "Would someone give cartridges a cigarette and a blindfold" with a huge gun in the background ................. "It was bad enough that Square talked about Cigarettes in a video game ad but the ad sure didn't apply to the N64 or the Gameboy cartridges games, that's for sure." Nintendo may have lost some thunder but they quickly gained it back with massive hits like Zelda: OOT for N64 and the Pokemon games on Gameboy.
That brings us to today where Square has now showed interest in making games for the upcoming Nintendo GameCube system, but it now looks like it isn't gonna happen anytime soon because the President of Nintendo wants nothing to do with Square after the bitter break up, despite how cool it would be to see Final Fantasy on the GBA and not the lame WonderSwan.