Decades before Dark Souls and Elden Ring, FromSoftware's first dark fantasy RPG was built "from a kind of ignorance": "It was the type of challenge a first-time game developer naively takes on"

Official art from King's Field 4, depicting a knight in silver armor amid numerous soldiers in bronze armor carrying torches.

From Demon's Souls to Elden Ring, the obtuse, challenging dark fantasy RPGs FromSoftware is known for trace their roots back to King's Field, which launched in 1994 just weeks after the PS1 debuted in Japan. In hindsight, building an ambitious, open-ended RPG on a brand-new console with then-cutting-edge 3D graphics was a bold choice for a debut game, but it seems FromSoftware's very inexperience is what allowed it to lay out the blueprint.

At least, that's how Shinichiro Nishida saw it at the turn of the century. Nishida was one of the developers on the original King's Field, and still works at FromSoftware to this day, having most recently served as a systems designer on Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree. In an interview for the King's Field Verdite Trilogy Perfect Guide in 2001, recently translated by Shmuplations, Nishida laid out his feelings on the series up to that point and how it came to be.