Late last year, Polygon teamed up with publisher Read-Only Memory to launch a Kickstarter campaign. We’d gotten a number of requests to turn our Final Fantasy 7 oral history feature into a book, and we thought it seemed like a fun experiment. So we gave it a shot. And thanks to 1,871 backers, the idea became a book.

Since then, we’ve been churning through the details, putting together what we’re calling 500 Years Later: An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII. And as of today, we’re happy to announce that the book is done, starting to arrive into backers’ hands and available for purchase.

Final Fantasy 7: An oral history Today, it sits above a Doutor coffee shop a few doors from a train station in a busy part of Hiyoshi, Yokohama. Visit the building and you won’t see a plaque commemorating the history or remnants of a company whose characters now model Louis Vuitton clothes and sell millions of games. Yet on that spot in 1983, inside his father’s office space, founder Masafumi Miyamoto began a development studio called Square. Continue reading ...

If you’re counting, that makes it nine months since the Kickstarter campaign closed, 20 months since the original article ran on this site, almost four years since I started thinking of this story, and about 21 years since Final Fantasy 7 went on sale in the first place. These things take time.

When I started working on this story, people still cared about Flappy Bird. Square Enix hadn’t even announced its Final Fantasy 7 remake. And now, through some combination of laziness, perfectionism and whatever else, I’ve had a hand in this story for about three times as long as the development team spent making the game itself.

In that time, we’ve put together essentially a director’s cut of the story that originally ran online, with a foreword from series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, new interview material, outtakes that didn’t fit in the original story, art from illustrator sparrows, design from Rachel Dalton and production from Darren Wall. It even comes with three bookmarks, one of which unlocks a particularly elaborate Easter egg.

All of which is to say, check out the book at Read-Only Memory’s site. Buy a copy if you like. Or just read the online version of the story again. Chances are you’ll have plenty of time before Square Enix’s remake hits.