Heroic programmer of the first three Final Fantasy games says he’d ‘never seen any roleplaying games until Final Fantasy’

Nasir Gebelli was an Iranian-American programmer who traveled to Japan on a work visa to work for Square in the late ’80s and early ’90s, where he was instrumental in the creation of the Final Fantasy series. Gebelli’s code is so well-regarded that John Romero called him “my number one programming god, my idol” in Honoring The Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers. He’s the one responsible for Final Fantasy 3’s airship, which hoons along above the overworld map so fast that other programmers weren’t able to recreate it.

Following his work on Secret of Mana, Gebelli retired, making rare public appearances like the time he was interviewed by Romero at an Apple II reunion in 1998. However, he recently spoke to NHK World, as spotted by GamesRadar, and talked about his time at Square. Prior to that, Gebelli had worked mainly on action games for the Apple II like the 1981 Defender-clone Gorgon. Going from that to the NES wasn’t as much of a leap as you might think.