The History of Tobal No. 1

Square entered the PlayStation era with a fighting game, and it outran everything else on the system.

Tobal No. 1 was developed by DreamFactory, a studio Square founded in November 1995 as a subsidiary with one assignment: make Square's first fighting game, and its first game for the PlayStation. The 17 founding members all came from 3D polygonal fighting games, and their chairman, Seiichi Ishii, had been a designer on Virtua Fighter at Sega and the director of the first two Tekken games at Namco.

What that pedigree produced was a fighter designed for a home console from the first sketch, not adapted from an arcade cabinet. It ran at up to 60 frames per second by refusing texture mapping, let fighters move freely in 3D, added a dungeon crawling Quest Mode for the solo player, wore character designs by Akira Toriyama, and shipped with a demo disc for a game called Final Fantasy VII.

HOW IT WAS MADE

A new studio, built for one job

A STAFF OF SPECIALISTS

DreamFactory was founded in November 1995 as a Square subsidiary and started with 17 members, every one of them with experience on 3D polygonal fighting games. In contemporary interviews the staff said the project came from their dissatisfaction with the state of fighting games: they wanted to build the one with the features they had always wanted.

THE DIRECTOR

Chairman Seiichi Ishii had helped pioneer the genre: a designer on Sega's Virtua Fighter and director of the first two Tekken games for Namco. Lead programmer Toru Ikebuchi had held the same role on Virtua Fighter. Square executive Hironobu Sakaguchi signed on as supervisor.

THE 60FPS TRADE

Tobal drops texture mapping entirely. The flat Gouraud shading that resulted bought superior resolution, lighting and frame rates over its competitors: 640 by 480 at up to 60 frames per second, when rival fighters were textured, slower and lower resolution. Dropping blood was a deliberate choice too, meant to widen the game's appeal in foreign markets.

BUILT FOR THE LIVING ROOM

Ishii reasoned that a game designed for a home console, rather than the arcade, would be played mostly alone, so it needed more single player depth than a versus fighter. Quest Mode was planned from the start for that player. Motion designer Masahiro Onoguchi later said it began as a simple bonus and grew in scale as the staff kept adding to it.

FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

What Ishii said best separated Tobal from its rivals was 360 degree control of the character in a 3D arena. Experienced players could grapple and throw from the side of, or behind, an opponent, something earlier fighting games had not done, while beginners could still produce flashy combinations by pressing the attack buttons.

CAPTURED, THEN SLOWED DOWN

Motion capture came from action film actors and martial artists, but the team preferred the actors: the martial artists moved too fast to translate well into the game's mechanics. The robot Hom was the exception, captured directly from motion designer Hitoshi Matsuda.

THE RELEASE

Japan first, then the world

Square released Tobal No. 1 in Japan on August 2, 1996. It was the publisher's first game for the PlayStation, its first fighting game, and the first release on its DigiCube label for Japanese convenience stores. Sony Computer Entertainment handled the international release: North America on October 31, 1996 and Europe on January 10, 1997.

The overseas version nearly looked different. Ishii said there were plans to alter the characters for the West, because the flat shaded look stood apart from other fighters and Toriyama's art style was not yet widely recognized outside Japan. There was no time to make the changes, so the game shipped as designed. Every version, Japanese and North American alike, carried a second disc: a sampler with a playable demo of Final Fantasy VII and video previews of Final Fantasy Tactics, Bushido Blade and SaGa Frontier.

THE TWO COVERS

Same game, two shelves

North America

A computer rendered Chuji lunges off the North American box, and the selling point sits under the logo in yellow: Final Fantasy VII, Sampler CD Included. Squaresoft and Sony Computer Entertainment, 1996.

Japan

Japan got Akira Toriyama's own illustration instead: Chuji in the foreground, Ill Goga behind him, under a plain Squaresoft wordmark. This is the art the game's character designer actually drew.

HOW IT WAS RECEIVED

Strong reviews, a Japanese hit

FAMITSU, 31 OUT OF 40

Japan's leading game magazine scored it 31 out of 40 on release, a solid mark for a new studio working in a new genre for an RPG publisher.

ELECTRONIC GAMING MONTHLY, 8.5 / 8.5 / 8.5 / 8

EGM's four reviewers said the controls take getting used to, but praised the animation and 3D play, called the battle mode the highlight, and counted Quest Mode and the Final Fantasy VII demo as bonuses that added to the game's value for money.

IGN, 8.7 OUT OF 10

IGN singled out the unique graphical presentation and the free ranging controls, noting the game ran at 60 frames per second in 640 by 480 resolution.

GAMESPOT, 7.4 OUT OF 10

GameSpot admired the variety of fighting styles in the normal game, but found the same controls worked sluggishly in Quest Mode. Game Informer was warmer at 9 out of 10, and Next Generation gave it four stars out of five, calling it a major player in an established genre while faulting the simple opponent AI.

THE SALES

Tobal topped the Japanese sales charts on release and sold 752,000 copies in Japan in 1996, making it the ninth best selling home video game of that year in Japan. Contemporary and later reporting attributed much of that strength to the Final Fantasy VII demo disc. North America was cooler: 99,183 copies, and a lasting reputation as a cult hit.

GAME REVOLUTION, B PLUS

Game Revolution found the blocking system confusing, but called Quest Mode the most innovative feature since, in its words, bosses.

WHAT IT LEFT BEHIND

A sequel that stayed home

The sequel, Tobal 2, followed in Japan in 1997 and was never released in North America or Europe, which froze the series in the West at exactly one game. A mobile version, Tobal M, appeared in Japan in December 2007. DreamFactory itself carried the formula forward into Ehrgeiz, its arcade and PlayStation fighter built with Namco.

The split reputation never healed. In Japan, Tobal No. 1 is remembered as a genuine hit from a hit year. In the West it is remembered first as the box that carried the Final Fantasy VII demo, and only second as what it actually was: the fastest, strangest and most free moving 3D fighter on the PlayStation in 1996.