The Time I Leaked Final Fantasy VII’s New Bosses

As someone who’s been in games media a long time now, I’ve dealt with tons of embargoes/NDAs. Over all those years, I’ve never broken any intentionally, and only a couple on accident.

But let me tell you the quick story of my biggest leak–and it was all Nick Rox’s fault.

As a bit of set-up, back in the olden days, JRPGs had very little presence in the West. Sure, some games like Phantasy Star, Final Fantasy, Crono Trigger, and others came our way, but they hadn’t reached the widespread popularity they would in later years.

Sony decided that it wanted to help Squaresoft push Final Fantasy VII leading up to its release, as it was a HUGE deal that the series had made the jump from Nintendo to PlayStation. As a part of that, Sony would be the publisher for FFVII outside of Japan.

For the Western release, Square would end up adding some new content to the game, the biggest of which (from my memory/understanding) was some sort of new weapon bosses.

I don’t know exactly. I’m not a FFVII person.

So, I’m working at GameFan, and we’ve got a copy of the game early for the benefit of doing up our review. I don’t remember how far in advance, but back in those days, it was far more common to have games months in advance of release, versus today when it might be days/a week.

I was the person running GameFan Online at the time, because I have long been cursed with doing online stuff when I wanted to be doing magazine stuff. One day Nick comes in, and is like, “Hey Mollie, let’s do a story on the English version of FFVII!”

He tells me that there’s these new bosses in the game, and that we should show them off on the site. At that point, I didn’t know anything about the game, didn’t care so much about it (I was faithful to FF6), and had no clue about any new content. So I just nodded along. He got me some screenshots, a few details, and I wrote up a news post. Didn’t really think all that much about it, and when work was over, I went home and put it out of my mind.

The next day, I’m strolling it to work, carefree and go lucky, when one of the few responsible adults we had at GameFan comes rushing up to me and yells, “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?!?”

He proceeds to tell me that Sony called first thing in the morning furious at us, as we had shown off content that wasn’t supposed to be shown yet. The few people who were there in the office had to then scramble to figure out how to use the website to pull the story. Because Nick had just dumped everything in my lap and asked me to do something with it, the story had my name on it, and thus Sony put the blame on me.

And thus, I would be the one responsible for leaking the new bosses for the Western release of Final Fantasy VII.

Thankfully, GameFan would go on to be the reason that pirate copies of Resident Evil 2 were showing up in SoCal game stores before the game even launched, so I was far from the biggest screw-up to come out of that magazine.