Hajime Tabata

While in middle school, Tabata played a historical role-playing game made by Koei and first imagined how much fun it would be to make his own game. In his last year of university, he applied for jobs in the video game industry and in other media arts such as documentaries, television and film. He worked at several different video game publishers prior to his being hired at Square Enix, which he said gave him experience making action games, arcade games, and role-playing games.

Square Enix

In the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, the international outpouring of support for Japan was paralleled at Square Enix by fan letters about the then-upcoming release of Type-0, and encouraged Tabata to make something special for the fans and those living through difficult times.

He became the director of Final Fantasy XV, taking over from Tetsuya Nomura in December 2013, a change that was announced in September the following year. He used to be co-director on the project. During his work on Final Fantasy XV, Tabata joked about his busy schedule, mentioning he regularly got only three hours sleep. Tabata, whose previous experience was with portable gaming devices, said that he was excited to work on console systems and wanted to "help players dive even deeper into their experiences".

Tabata formerly served as producer for Final Fantasy XV downloadable content. His work on the downloadable content was planned to continue into 2019. He and staff within Square Enix Business Division 2 were also working on a new intellectual property targeting the next-generation of consoles. Development for this project began in earnest in 2018, after previously only having a small team of 20-30 people assigned to it.

In March 2018, Tabata created a new Tokyo game studio for Square Enix called Luminous Productions, which consists of several key members from the Final Fantasy XV team. He was the COO and head of studio for Luminous Productions.

Tabata resigned from Luminous Productions and Square Enix Group on October 31, which was confirmed by Square Enix on November 7. In addition, 3 of the 4 DLCs for Final Fantasy XV were cancelled.