The co-creator of Discord, Final Fantasy 11, made the prototype app to discuss strategy with his MMO buddies

Discord seems to be the place where everything is happening these days. A developer wants to spread news about a new game? Discord. Want to run a Tabletop Game? Discord. Want to arrange a real-world meet-up? I kid you not, Discord. I was asked for my Discord handle at a coffee morning last weekend. It is unavoidable.

Final Fantasy 11 is at least partly to blame for this.

Stanislav Vishnevskiy, the app's current CTO and co-creator, revealed in an interview with Famitsu that the Discord that we love and the 40 servers that are perma-muted for emojis were in fact inspired by Square Enix’s first MMO. (The following quotes are machine-translated)

"When I studied, I was obsessed by Final Fantasy 11. I created a software prototype that could be used to play the game. I then moved to California, where I joined a company named GREE. It was there that I met Jason Citron, the co-founder. I thought it would nice to make our communication tool available to more people, so i started developing Discord seriously."

I can't fault him for making his own proto-Discord when he was a student. As a young millennial I remember the glory days of cassette tapes, as well as the ancient gods of the internet: Teamspeak Skype and Ventrilo. They now lie at the bottom of the abyss. Chronos killed his father and Hades killed Chronos. You can still use them all, but Discord is now the default.

I think it's because Discord is so easy to use, you can set up your server without even looking. It's like trying to convince someone to use a search engine other that Google or a D&D fanatic to use a different tabletop gaming system. It's going to take a lot of work for very little gain, and we're already there.

It's interesting to note that, based on what I can tell from the r/ffxiv Subreddit, Scarletchild, a user, was a part of Discord when it was in its infancy around 2015-2016. "We used have so many commands dedicated to FF14, multiple databases at the time," wrote Scarletchild. "I miss it being something that people knew, and when i point it out, they don't seem to believe me. You can't find this nonsense on the Discord Wiki page."

I did some digging and, while I didn't find a mythologised page with a name drop, I found this version of the website shared by webdesignmuseum.org. It has a lot of FF14 names, a few screenshots, as well as spoof users using Final Fantasy-appropriate user names. This AMA from 2015 promised the same level of integration.

Once we fix the bugs, we will integrate Final Fantasy. We want to link the Lodestone profile with Discord so that it will show you in game. We want Discord server owners syncing with FC rosters to automatically set permissions. We also want to add slash command to search items on XIVDB, and post them in Discord chat."

Vishnevskiy is still playing Final Fantasy and has enjoyed Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail immensely, even if the response's been mixed. "I took a whole week off from work," he admits. "Most of my jobs are at level 100." My main job used to be Machinist. Now I play Pictomancer. Bob Ross is coming for us all.