Alby_da_Wolf said: LOL, Ninty's giant crow ended up pecking at Ninty's arse itself.

Ninty only did good to Square and got utterly shafted. To be honest not something to cheer, esp. that Nintendo's existence was almost jeopardised. The company that allowed console gaming to exist, don't forget that Sony basically stole the market from Nintendo, which mainly Nintendo had built, it paints another picture. You probably wouldn't be a Sony gamer had Nintendo not been a true raven.

All I will say on this matter is:

HA! Nintendo had it coming after what they did to Sony. As they say, Karma is sure a bitch, isn't it? Who can forget when Nintendo turned their back on Sony like that??? So, they just got a taste of their own medicine not only with Square leaving them, but Sony creating the best-selling gaming console in history with the PS1. It was a double wham!

I don't feel sorry for Nintendo in the slightest. Everything happened for a reason.

As you said, things happen for a reason.

One of the reasons why Nintendo backed out of the Sony deal was because apparently the deal included Sony having a large amount of control of software licensing. So this may have affected Nintendo's control of the software they would have had to develop under such partnership, as well as profits since they benefit a lot out of selling millions and millions of their own software.

Nintendo turned Sony away because Sony wanted a contract that obtains the rights to software made on the platform no platform holder would accept this not even Sony themselves which is why even Sega turned Sony away as well when they tried to partner with them. You're talking karma well funny enough some former SE employees are now part of one of the biggest first party studio at Nintendo and have created one of the best JRPG franchises around.

They already signed a deal. Also former employees of almost all companies are in other companies.

They didn't actually sign one from what I've seen the companies came to a basic agreement with a contact pending Sony later then took the contract to Nintendo who threw it out leading to a stalled situation as neither company wanted to budge but Sony were confident the deal would go through Nintendo just went with Phillips instead, Sega also threw out the same proposal. You missed the point on the employees part as well he's going on about karma but a whole entire team from SE is now at Nintendo those same employees left SE because their own work was cut down in favour of FFVII.

I think it is hardly probable that they had a working prototype without any kind of deal signed, they would have in the least a DOA or something of sort even more because Sony was touching Nintendo IPs (not games necessarily) to do it.

Have this whole team of SE left the company and joined Nintendo at the time of FFVII? Or are you talking something much more recent?

The was a partnership in place which is different from a signed deal as a partnership is when two or more entities come together on a business venture a partnership can be agreed but doesn't exactly have to be seen through which is common. The partnership here clearly had the intent of a cd based platform but no contract was in place for the actual product itself when it came into being.

Monolith are a former SE team they did Xenogears, at the time of FFVII Square put a lot of their focus on VII over other projects and even pulled people from other teams to work on it one of the teams who got hit hard was the Xenogears team this left the game in an inconsistent state (elements of that were even used in VII) when released and to make things worse Square began focusing less on non FF projects due to VII's success so the full vision and planned future installment were put on hold which prompted the team lead by Takahasi and his wife to leave in 1999 and form their own studio. They had a stint with Namco before being bought by Nintendo in the tail end of the Gamecube era Monolith are now Nintendo's current top first party team outside of the internal EPD units.

Xenogears began as Final Fantasy VII but SE felt it was too dark. Cut their budget but still let them make the game but were unable to fully finish the game.  That talent worked on SNES FF games and the Chrono series and left to what would become Monolith and develop the Xenosaga series. No, they didn't just jump to Nintendo. However they were unhappy at Namco I believe and somehow met with Nintendo and liked working with them with Gamecube and DS.