Yuji Naka discusses the toughest part of putting together Phantasy Star Online

Believe it or not, Phantasy Star Online is coming up on its 20th anniversary. The series is still going strong today with Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis Cloud heading to Switch. It's sure to reel in even more fans and push the series to new heights.

In honor of the 20th anniversary, Polygon spoke to Phantasy Star Online producer Yuji Naka to see what challenges the game presented 20 years back.

I recall that the greatest hurdle was trying to figure out how to get people from around the world to play online in an age where the internet was still not readily available everywhere. When we found out that even with the use of optical fiber, information only travelled at seven and a half times around the world per second, we knew that we could not build games the normal way. So, we wanted to understand this environment better and developed ChuChu Rocket! first, then we took what we learned to develop Phantasy Star Online.