An interview with the man who created a Final Fantasy 8 fansite in 2024

The best new website of 2024 could be one against all odds Final Fantasy 8 Fan page.

Yes, exactly: screw your fancy new PS5 Final Fantasies – religiously Final Fantasy 8 Fan Phil Salvador decided to start a website dedicated to what he believes to be the best Final Fantasyone full of very funny articles and passionate arguments.

In his main job, Salvador works as library director Video Game History Foundationwhich means he’s constantly finding and cataloging old gaming publications and is unusually aware of how games are received Final Fantasy 8 were accepted, discussed and promoted. That, coupled with his deep and abiding love of the game and a penchant for weird URLs (like https://ff8isthe.best), meant Salvador had more than enough gas in the tank to fuel an entire website in his spare time.

I recently caught up with Salvador via video chat to talk about his new website, which he still can’t believe is doing so well that he’s being interviewed about it.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Polygon: It’s wild that it worked out so well, right? They just showed up with a website and a post that says: “Final Fantasy 8 Fucking rules, eat my ass.”

Phil Salvador: Yes, this post seemed to resonate with people. The reason I started this was simply because I was amused by all the new domain names that have been popping up over the last few years as there are now more extensions you can use for URLs. I had developed a reputation among friends and colleagues as an aggressive defender Final Fantasy 8 and thought it would be fun to create a place to put my thoughts about it without it intruding on my other work.

I think what really got me excited, and maybe the reason it resonates with other people, is that it doesn’t really have a point. I like the idea of ​​having a website that isn’t monetized and doesn’t feed into bigger brands or social media accounts. It’s just a place where I write some stupid things every now and then, and sometimes it’s smart and sometimes it’s not. And I miss that.

There’s a very early internet spirit when people were out there just making websites. They hadn’t dreamed of being found by people who didn’t already know about it. I definitely think people respond to that.

Yes, the reaction I’ve seen is that a lot of people also want to do something similar. People miss the time in your life when you could just be creative and do things for fun. I think this is something we all have as children and that disappears as we get older and have to deal with responsibilities and paychecks.

I love this blog because it’s a place where I can just write a post that says “eat my ass” and no one can stop me. If people react to that, that’s their problem. I hope that there will be a critical review Final Fantasy 8 in the near future, but I don’t expect that. This will not be the right website for it. That doesn’t have to be the case.

One of my favorite posts on the site, besides this Incredible magazine gag you unearthedis your essay about how we’re stuck in 2007, In the year you argue, an early YouTuber ranted about the game and helped promote public consensus about it FF8 from “universally popular” to “divisive.”

At the Video Game History Foundation, we say: If you want to study a video game, it’s not enough to have the game. We believe you need to understand how it was played and understood. For this article in particular, I found it really interesting to go back through all the magazines whenever one was in the time period Final Fantasy 8 was checked. I would always scroll through and see what was in the review and people loved it!

I think a lot of these things we take for granted. We’re simply putting it down to what was in the air at the time, but if you look at what was happening in different places in gaming culture, you can see how this change is coming about. You can see ideas taking hold early on, and that’s what we want to build on. Our collection is about things that help people understand the role video games play in culture and how it has changed over time.

Yes, your blog highlighted this shift for me in ways I hadn’t fully registered yet!

Yeah, I think especially in the print era when there were fewer people publishing opinions or perspectives, it was easier to reshape the way people thought about things. One of the examples I love is this one AND for the Atari 2600 OK Reviews when it came out. It wasn’t exactly popular, but it was a game that got two stars in the same edition while another game got one star. What happened, however, was when people started writing the history of video games and interviewing former Atari employees, people at Atari and around it AND And Pac Man as scapegoats for what was happening in the industry.

It has become a sort of Omelas child upon which we heap our insults in order to explain the history of video games. I think it’s worth looking back and understanding how people saw it at different times because it’s never that cut and dry. We want a simple narrative and the game story is never that simple.

One of the key messages I’ll be writing about in the blog is the idea, which I think is one of the reasons there’s been such a backlash Final Fantasy 8 Over the years it has become clear that it is a game about love, emotions and vulnerability. Early internet culture responded to this Final Fantasy 8 is predominantly a love story by writing it off or saying it’s stupid. […] Because we now have such a wide range of opinions on this topic, there are people who are more willing to engage with it.

Squall’s storyline in this game kind of reflects the audience’s detached attitude towards what was then an emotional love story, right?

It’s about his character becoming vulnerable. Squall and Rinoa both deal with a lot of tragedy and loneliness in their lives – Rinoa was never really part of their family and kind of fought it and pushed people away from her, and Squall refuses to open up to people – and you find themselves and both grow up at the end of the story. I don’t want to spoil the space scene, but people will know this scene; It’s a nice way of saying that people literally find each other.

You have a Call to action It’s kind of hidden on the website so people can easily create their own version of this type of website. Can you tell me a little more about it?

I love seeing people be weirdly creative online. I love unusual Twitch streams. I love people doing experimental things with YouTube. I love bold animations. I love anyone who tries to do something simply because they can, and I feel like the internet is no longer suitable as a medium for that. Obviously I came of age in the early 2000s and there were a lot of novel websites. People make weird single-serving sites or places where they put weird things. I think we’ve gotten used to the idea that the web is just a place to look for information about something, rather than a place to express opinions, as an experimental Twitch stream might be.

I don’t think we need to go back to our relationship with the internet like it was in the ’90s, but I think we can create a space for something like that. This site was a fun experiment because I had absolutely no expectations for it. I wanted to write things on it for fun and send them to friends, but strangely enough it caught on almost entirely by word of mouth. And that is magical for me. I tried googling the website and maybe it’s because it’s new, but it doesn’t really show up in search and I don’t really care. The site exists. Eat my ass.