25 years ago, Dragon Quest invented the console RPG. Not that most of us knew what an RPG was back in 1986.
Even three years later, when Dragon Quest finally reached the U.S., I only knew the term RPG as an acronym for "rocket-propelled grenade." Growing up reading G.I. Joe comics had made me moderately fascinated with military terminology; author Larry Hama parlayed his personal experience serving in Vietnam into a war comic that, while not exactly realistic, definitely had a ring of martial authenticity about it. The other (and, these days, far better-known) meaning of RPG -- role-playing game -- was completely foreign to me. My family didn't have a computer, so I was never exposed to the likes of Ultima or The Bard's Tale until years later. As for pen-and-paper RPGs, those were out, too: Dungeons & Dragons was persona non grata in my conservative home town. We even had an overzealous police detective who actively crusaded against D&D, calling it the devil's work and hosting mandatory school assemblies at which he would lecture students about how playing D&D would make us commit suicide and dabble in the Satanic arts.
Needless to say, when Nintendo Power magazine -- my primary source of video game information back in those days -- began promoting a "new" kind of video game called RPGs, my first reaction was puzzlement. RPGs? The games they were promoting looked like classical fantasy fare filled with swords and spells, not war epics bursting with machine guns and rocket launchers. Eventually, though, my curiosity got the better of me and I began reading up on these oddly misnamed adventures. One title in particular caught my attention thanks in large part to the detailed illustrations the magazine had commissioned to accompany its write-ups: Dragon Warrior, the U.S. version of Dragon Quest. Its graphics looked awful, but its concept spoke to me on the same level that The Legend of Zelda and Metal Gear had. It was clearly a game full of stuff for the hero to discover and use, and that meant a huge adventure full of exploration and discovery.
When I received a copy of Dragon Warrior that year for Christmas -- from my super-conservative grandparents, who surely would have freaked out if they'd known that they'd all but introduced me to a world of Satanic blood rituals -- I was immediately hooked. The visuals were primitive and the music was simple and frequently shrill, but right away I was pulled in by the sense of scale to the open world as well as the faux-Shakespearean writing. In an age where basic grammatical coherence was a rarity in any Nintendo game, being commissioned to rescue a king's daughter in elaborate formal English was a stunning change of pace. Of course, the idea of saving a princess was hardly original, but Dragon Warrior managed to put a fresh twist on that stale chestnut, too: My unnamed hero (whom I dubbed PSI) defeated the dragon guarding Princess Gwaelin before I'd explored even a quarter of the realm. Where other games ended at saving the girl, that objective was merely a means to an end in Dragon Warrior. With Gwaelin reunited with her family, the true quest was bequeathed upon brave young PSI, and the princess' guidance helped steer me through the remainder of the world. I may have been embarrassed of (and for) Dragon Warrior's stunningly awful graphics, but the quest had me hooked, and when I met up with my school friends a day or two after Christmas I couldn't stop gushing about this crazy game that used rescuing the princess as a mere preamble to the real adventure.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was enraptured with the same story that had hooked millions of my peers on the other side of the world a few years prior. The American game released Dragon Warrior in 1989 had debuted in Japan back in 1986 under the name Dragon Quest. The version published in the U.S. was modestly improved over its initial rendition -- the graphics, surprisingly enough, had originally looked even more primitive -- but the essence was the same. It was the tale of a lone warrior who ventured into the wilderness in search of an abducted princess, battling a variety of colorfully rendered foes as he pursued a quest line that led him all across the land and, ultimately, to the wicked fortress Charlock, glowering directly across the water from the town where the adventure had begun all those hours ago.
Dragon Quest had largely been the brain child of a man named Yuji Horii, who had stumbled across U.S. developer Sir-Tech's RPG Wizardry at a MacWorld Expo and fell in love with the depth and challenge beneath its spartan wireframe visuals. Horii was a writer at Chun Soft, a developer closely related to Japanese publisher Enix, and he quickly began contemplating ways to take his own shot at creating something along the lines of Wizardry. Enix had already established itself as a PC developer, but by 1985 Nintendo's Famicom was all the rage in Japan, and Horii decided that his take on the western RPG genre needed to work on Famicom.
The resulting creation, Dragon Quest, "was very different from PC RPGs," Horii says. "There was no keyboard, and the system was much simpler, using just a controller. But I still thought that it would be really exciting for the player to play as their alter ego in the game. I personally was playing Wizardry and Ultima at the time, and I really enjoyed seeing my own self in the game."
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