Listen to my story, this may be our last chance...
01 / FFStory history
Introduction
My name is Andrea Corriga, born in 1993, and I am the founder of Final Fantasy Story, better known as FFStory.
At the venerable age of 32, as I prepare to become a father, I felt a strong wave of nostalgia for what I used to do at sixteen: experiment with the web and programming, try to create things from scratch, and spend entire afternoons on small projects that felt enormous at the time. That nostalgia is what inspired this article. Between the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, I created FFStory - a project born from the combination of my love for computer science and the Final Fantasy series, which I now look back on with particular affection.
Looking back, FFStory was much more than a hobby. It was a fundamental part of my journey: one of the building blocks that helped bring me exactly where I am today.
This is what I looked like at sixteen when I created the site... and yes, that is the very same chair (rather uncomfortable, although at sixteen I did not have back pain) and my legendary Acer with Windows XP and 512 MB of RAM, on which I built everything.
02 / FFStory history
The first versions of the site
The first incarnation of the site was built with Microsoft FrontPage 2003, a visual HTML editor capable of creating genuine code monsters that were incompatible with any browser other than Internet Explorer. At the time, though, it was all I had to turn the idea of FFStory into something concrete.
I constantly changed the structure of the site as I learned new techniques: from hard-coded styles inside HTML tags, to my first experiments with CSS stylesheets, and eventually my first bits of PHP include magic, which made me feel as if I had discovered the Holy Grail.
During this journey I was lucky enough to meet other young webmasters from that era, including Stefano Gennari, founder of the former Zell Fantasy, now called Omnia Crystallis. They helped me understand the principles of programming and web development. Stefano was the one who explained PHP includes to me.
To be honest, FFStory initially took inspiration from Zell Fantasy in a rather... obvious way. Let us call it an affectionate copy of Zell Fantasy.
03 / FFStory history
The community
2010 was also Facebook's golden era: a time when people could share photos and links on their pages without paying hundreds of euros to reach a few dozen users.
For that reason, the Facebook page Le Frasi più belle di Final Fantasy quickly became a reference point for Italian fans of the series. The page constantly published quotes from the main characters - short, nostalgic lines that generated shares, discussions and a sense of belonging.
By spending time in that community I eventually became one of its administrators, and the page gave FFStory a huge boost in visibility. Many users found the site through those posts and the regular links to the homepage or to the news published there.
Alongside all of this, a forum and a chat board grew into lively places where users compared their playthroughs, discussed secrets and shared their interpretations of the series.
During that period I also met other administrators, such as Stefania Leo, the page's creator, and Francesca Pastori. They created the drawings used in the site's graphics.
04 / FFStory history
The first guides
The first content published on FFStory was a set of guides dedicated to Final Fantasy VII, which I manually transcribed from the 1997 official guide.
At sixteen I had no awareness of the risks connected to copyright. More generally, the web worked very differently from today: it was a more naive, more open environment in which most amateur projects were powered by passion and sharing.
Over time, other users began contributing guides for different chapters of the series. In all likelihood, some of that material had been copied from other popular sites of the period. Since I was sixteen and not particularly interested in checking the sources of the material people sent me, it was published as it arrived.
05 / FFStory history
The return online
Sixteen years have passed since the publication of the very first version of FFStory.
In the meantime, life changed, my career matured, and the site went through a continuous cycle of pauses, revisions and returns. In 2013 I finally closed the project to focus on university.
Today I decided to bring FFStory back online not to recover traffic or chase 'glory', but to preserve the memory of what it meant to me: a life experience, a place where I grew, and a trace of the person I was becoming.
06 / FFStory history
Conclusion
FFStory is, in every sense, an archive of memories: a container for youthful passion and a record of how a small experiment can become an important part of a personal and professional journey.
Inside this site live the enthusiasm of a teenager who wanted to build something from scratch, the energy of a passionate community, and the unintentional beginning of a path that eventually led me to the world of artificial intelligence.
If you would like to explore more of my life, you can find me here:
The last photo dates from 2023, the year Ciorts, my little cat, passed away. He had been with me from primary school through the end of my studies and the completion of my Ph.D. I dedicate this final paragraph to him.
A note on the original guides
When I was sixteen, I wrote the Final Fantasy VII guides by transcribing material from the 1997 official guide. Because of my age and limited experience at the time, I did not always verify the sources of contributions made by others. Some content may therefore have been copied from sources I still cannot identify.