"I didn't actually pitch for the project. I was asked to write it by the editor, either because he liked my work or because I was in the same state as the Square offices or both. So I visited the offices, they loaned me a bunch of stuff, I played the game and wrote up an outline.

It was after that that they told me they liked my outline but they were working on the new iteration of the game, so could I retool that story to be about that? They sent lots of reference on the new game, and there was just no way to do the first outline with characters from the new game, so they paid me a kill fee for the outline and I started from scratch with the new story outline.