Game Maker's Toolkit

Early computer RPGs were attempts to turn Dungeons & Dragons into code. D&D came out in 1974, the same era as PLATO mainframes, teletypes and UNIX, and the same people used both. A random number generator stood in for the 20-sided die, and numbers tracked experience and hit points.

Programmers tried to make the computer a digital dungeon master. Some early games already went beyond the tabletop: Rogue used procedural generation for endless dungeons, others let dozens of players team up on one network, and Colossal Cave Adventure dropped combat and shaped adventure games.

Wizardry and Ultima brought RPGs to home computers and spawned the Western genre. Both released in 1981. Wizardry offered a party in a ten-storey wireframe dungeon, while Ultima offered an open world with quests and a hunger system. Almost every Western RPG franchise traces back to this pair.

Their heirs include The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic and Dungeon Master; Interplay went on to Wasteland and Fallout, and Ultima Underworld inspired Deus Ex and The Elder Scrolls. Earlier games like Beneath Apple Manor and Temple of Apshai did not spark much interest.

Japanese players loved imported Western RPGs, but the genre needed consoles. Japan's first home computers brought Western RPGs and local imitations like The Black Onyx by Henk Rogers. A 1985 Computer Gaming World dispatch called fantasy RPGs the pinnacle of Japanese admiration.

Miyamoto said The Legend of Zelda drew on The Black Onyx and Ultima. Satoru Iwata was among early adopters playing imports on Western machines.

Horii and Nakamura ported Western genres to the Famicom by simplifying controls. They first made Portopia Serial Murder Case, replacing a text parser with a command list, then did the same for the RPG with Dragon Quest in spring 1986.

Portopia is seen as the defining visual novel and inspired Hideo Kojima. Yuji Horii loved Wizardry and Koichi Nakamura loved Ultima, so combat came from the first and the overworld from the second.

Dragon Quest kept the Western look but cut almost every choice. Battles became a menu with large colourful sprites, towns became single map tiles, the only character choice was your name, and levelling was straightforward. Manga humour and Akira Toriyama's art made it approachable, and sequels sold millions.

Toriyama turned Horii's slime sketch, a retread of Wizardry's "boring blob", into a mascot. Mark Brown calls Dragon Quest "a distillation of a distillation of a distillation of Dungeons & Dragons."

The Dragon Quest school-day release rule was voluntary, not law. Enix chose on its own not to release games on school days; the story of a government law is a myth. Dragon Quest XI still launched on a Saturday in Japan.

Its success convinced publishers to greenlight Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star and Digital Devil Story, and inspired variations like the parody Mother and Sweet Home, whose planned 3D remake became Resident Evil.

Hardware and audience pushed Japan toward set heroes and stories. Console limits and a wish for accessibility led Japanese RPGs to a fixed hero and a story, while Western RPGs stayed on computers for a hardcore crowd who design their own character.

Final Fantasy later proved JRPGs could sell abroad, far more than Dragon Quest did.

Distance from D&D explains why only RPGs divide by geography. Western designers drew straight from D&D, which they still played in great numbers, while Japanese designers drew from copies of copies. No Japanese platformer or Western racing game exists as a category.

Japan was never D&D-free: The Tower of Druaga's maker picked up D&D on a business trip to America, and D&D's 1985 Japanese translation shaped the first Final Fantasy's classes and elemental attacks. As Brown puts it, "nothing is ever that cut and dry."

Rogue shows how one obscure game spread both East and West. Nakamura took a colleague's obsession, "a weird PC game from America," as the model for Mystery Dungeon, which adds random generation and permadeath and now has more than 30 games.

Spin-offs feature Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Etrian Odyssey and Dragon Quest, while Western indie designers remixed Rogue's core ideas.

Tangled cross-influence led the series to name five icons instead of one. Design Icons normally picks a single game as a genre's key influence, but for the RPG it names D&D, Ultima, Wizardry, Dragon Quest and Rogue.

Robert Woodhead calls such games "nothing but rings in the chain that bind all games together."