Answering This Final Fantasy IX Choice Incorrectly 60 Times Leads To A Funny Easter Egg
Old-school video game Easter eggs are just built differently — where most games nowadays hide away little inter-franchise references behind hard-to-reach spots or in small bits of optional side-content, some older gaming Easter eggs were actually so obscure that they weren't discovered for years. Many gaming classics from the 90s/2000s had a habit of putting extra surprises in places no average player would even think of reaching, and it seems "Final Fantasy 9" is no exception.
At the start of the game, the player character is sitting through a briefing on the upcoming kidnapping plan before being given a dialogue choice to confirm his part in the scheme. For the most part, it's an entirely meaningless choice with no gameplay impact that seems to be testing whether the player was paying attention to the dialogue more than anything — picking the wrong option just loops the conversation back to the same choice, and most probably wouldn't get it wrong more than once or twice. The average player certainly wouldn't think of deliberately hitting the wrong answer over and over again to see if anything special happened, and any who did would most likely assume there was nothing more to see after the first 10 or 20 times.
So why the developers put a special interaction in that dialogue prompt that only triggers after hitting the wrong choice over 60 times and wouldn't be seen by the vast majority of players, is, frankly, anyone's guess.
Answering incorrectly 64 times will earn you a scolding
Should Zidane insist that his job is to kidnap Queen Brahne instead of Princess Garnet more times than a minute has seconds, Ruby — a fellow troupe member — will burst into the meeting room to call him "more stubborn than a grumpy mule." DidYouKnowGaming and some other footage of the easter egg cite "around 60 times," the extra scene actually plays after 64 times exactly, a fact that — according to a comment on the footage — was included in the PrimaGames official guidebook.
However, what doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere is why the developers chose 64 times precisely. It's not an insignificant number, in both quantity and meaning — some fans have theorized that it may be a reference to the Nintendo 64, the platform that "Final Fantasy" was meant to continue as a console exclusive with "Final Fantasy 7" but ultimately left behind. Knowing that the reason the "Final Fantasy" developers had to switch over to the PlayStation was partially because of Nintendo's insistence on sticking to game cartridges instead of the new CD-ROM format, it could plausibly be a hidden dig — though not that much more plausible than 64 benign an arbitrarily high number the developers decided on scolding the players over.