 As of July 30 , 2008 , Final Fantasy XII holds the Guinness World Record for longest development period in a video game production . The record states it took a total of five years , spanning from 2001 until its release in 2006 . At a Final Fantasy XII " postmortem " at MIT in March 2009 , Hiroshi Minagawa mentioned that several years of production were devoted to the creation of custom tools used for the development of the game . It was also listed as 8th on the Guinness top 50 games of all time in 2009 . 
