Koji Sugimoto, the creator behind Final Fantasy, finds it puzzling that there’s so much nostalgia for graphics from the PlayStation 1 era. In a recent post on social media, he reminisced about how his team used to put in a lot of effort to address various visual issues with the PS1 that many players appear to overlook now.
Sugimoto is a seasoned professional in the gaming industry, boasting over two decades of experience and having contributed to 20 different game developments. His career began with programming visual effects for the original SNES version of Chrono Trigger, released in 1995. Some of his notable projects include Final Fantasy 10, Final Fantasy 10-2, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7, and The 3rd Birthday, which was exclusive to PSP. He also worked on three games for the original PlayStation console: Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, and Threads of Fate.
Chrono Trigger Dev Worked Hard to Minimize PS1 Texture Warping Players Seem to Miss Nowadays
Recently, Sugimoto expressed that he doesn’t share the sentiment for the nostalgia surrounding PS1-era graphics, marked by low polygon counts and multiple visual imperfections. He connected his perspective to his professional background in the industry, spurred by a recent tweet from Unity Japan about a new engine feature that mimics PS1-style texture distortion. Sugimoto reminisced about how such distortion, resulting from hardware constraints, was a persistent annoyance for developers and a focus of his teams’ efforts to either eliminate or significantly reduce it. “In those days,” Sugimoto penned, “we exerted so much fruitless labor trying to prevent distortion, only for it to be later admired as ‘charming.'” This observation was initially reported by Automaton West.
In contrast to its successors, the initial PlayStation 1 console was hampered by significant hardware restrictions that negatively affected its graphic rendering capabilities. One of these limitations was the absence of a depth buffer, also known as the Z-buffer, which is a type of memory used to help determine visible and hidden surfaces in 3D objects. This omission required developers to explicitly tell the console the sequence in which each polygon, or two-dimensional shape forming 3D objects, should be drawn.
What Is PS1-Style Texture Warping?
Due to its GPU design, the PlayStation 1 utilized a basic technique called affine texture mapping for applying images (textures) onto polygons. Although this method was quick, it failed to adjust textures based on the distance of each corner from the camera. This drawback led to some objects in specific PS1 games appearing distorted, unstable, or seeming to move erratically when observed from certain perspectives.
In the past, we put an immense amount of energy into preventing something considered undesirable then, which is now often referred to as “endearing” or “charming”.
Managing the sequence in which polygons are drawn significantly decreased significant visual anomalies, yet it barely touched upon the issue of texture distortion. Developers employed various strategies to minimize this impact, such as dividing polygons into smaller parts, aligning textures to prevent stretching in specific instances, applying flat shading, limiting camera movement, and even pre-distorting textures so that the resulting affine mapping would correct them. However, most of these methods were labor-intensive, which is what Sugimoto referred to as a “fruitless endeavor” when discussing the modern nostalgia for graphics from the PlayStation 1 era.
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2025-08-09 02:47