In July 1999, the industrial metal band Powerman 5000 wrote and released the single "When Worlds Collide", which would become one of their signature songs.

On February 23, 2016, patch version 3.2 of the "Heavensward" expansion for Final Fantasy XIV Online would be released, entitled "The Gears of Change". During the Containment Bay S1T7 trial, there is a boss fight against Sephirot, the Fiend, in two phases. The first phase's music is a rearranged version of "Battle to the Death", a boss theme originating from Final Fantasy VI where Fiend first appeared, while the second phase's music was an original song entitled "Fiend", composed and arranged by Masayoshi Soken with lyrics by Michael-Christopher Koji Fox.

The same day, a thread was made on Square Enix's forums noting the similarities between "Fiend" and "When Worlds Collide". Powerman 5000 were somehow informed of this and took to Facebook on February 24 to accuse the game's developers of ripping off "When Worlds Collide" while writing "Fiend". They claimed they were only making these allegations because the song was used in a video game, stating "If it was a song made by a fan, we wouldn't care." After the story gained traction and several mixed responses were put against Square Enix and Powerman 5000, the band's frontman Spider One made another Facebook post on February 25 revealing that the band would not be taking legal action against Square Enix, while emphasizing that their original post was "Just an observation" about "a piece of music that was way too similar to be coincidence" and there was "no cry for attention or publicity", before briefly advertising their upcoming tour dates in March and April.

In response to the controversy, the game's producer/director Naoki Yoshida released a statement in the original forum thread that spurred the controversy explaining how they created "Fiend", and stated that Soken claimed to him he was unaware of "When Worlds Collide" when writing the song: