Discord exists thanks to its founder’s abiding love for FFXI, Square Enix’s first MMO game

If you ever wondered where Discord came from, you have an answer now, and FFXI, Square Enix’s first MMO, is at the center of it

Square Enix

If you ever wondered where Discord came from, you have an answer now, and FFXI, Square Enix’s first MMO, is at the center of it. Discord co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy made the comments in a recent interview with Famitsu, where he said he was already working on an early version of Discord while in school, inspired by how much fun he was having in Vana’diel (thanks, Siliconera).

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Vishnevskiy said he wanted to create an app that let him talk to friends and other people playing FFXI who enjoyed it as much as he did. Work on the app apparently didn’t progress far beyond that simple concept, but Vishnevskiy was still keen on it when he met Jason Citron, Discord’s other co-founder.

Citron had worked on OpenFeint previously, a social platform for games, before selling that to Japanese social networking company GREE. Citron founded Hammer and Chisel as a mobile game studio, before he and Vishnevskiy decided to bring Vishnevskiy’s vision of a communication platform for gamers to life with what eventually became Discord.

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Famitsu asked Vishnevskiy if he played FFXIV as well, and it turns out his love of Final Fantasy doesn’t stop with XI. Vishnevskiy started playing FFXIV with the ill-fated 1.0 version and stuck around after the Calamity. He swapped Machinist for Pictomancer once Dawntrail launched, but almost all his jobs are at level 100 now – not an easy task.

So there you have it. FFXI might look rough and be constantly overshadowed by its more narratively ambitious sibling, but if it weren’t for Vana’diel, we might not have Discord today.