Bringing Kingdom Hearts into the HD era has proven to be a bit more difficult than expected, as Square Enix has confessed that the studio lost the original assets for the game, making the HD Collection all the more labor intensive.
During a Square E3 video, game director Tetsuya Nomura explained:
Kingdom Hearts 1 was created a long, long time ago, so actually the original data was missing already. It was lost, so we had to research, and we had to dig out from the actual game what was available and recreate everything for HD. We had to recreate all the graphics and it was actually not that easy.
Talk about a frustrating situation. Let's just hope they still have the original assets from Kingdom Hearts II. I don't want to have to wait another five years to get that one in HD!
[Via]