The Birth of the Japanese RPG | Design Icons

In the mid seventies, a game was released that could arguably be described as the single most influential game of all time. But it's not a video game. I'm talking about the unstoppable tabletop roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons. Reporter: "The idea of the game, which is played by highly imaginative and intelligent kids is to assume the role of one of the characters". D&D was designed by Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson, as a combination of miniature wargames and epic fantasy novels.

In play, one person is the dungeon master who dreams up a vivid storyline of quests and creatures - for a group of other players to work through. The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974 - which was around the same time that the first games were being written for ancient mainframe computers like the PLATO, teletype terminals, and super early operating systems like UNIX. And if you were a big enough geek to be messing around with those things, you were probably also a big enough geek to be playing D&D.

And so it’s not surprising that many of these early computer games were an attempt to translate the famous pen-and-paper game into programming code. And turn the computer into a digital dungeon master. These games brazenly emulated D&D staples like setting up a character and picking your initial stats. Having probability-based actions, but using a random number generator in place of a 20-sided die. And using numbers to track a character's experience and hit points.

And these early games were not as primitive as you might assume. Some even had story-based quests, the option to recruit monsters, and even the ability to team up with dozens of other players on the same network of machines. And there were inventive, experimental takes on the idea, too. Colossal Cave Adventure stripped out combat and focused on D&D's story-telling, and ended up influencing the entire adventure game genre and kickstarting companies like Sierra and Infocom.

Rogue used procedural generation to make an infinite supply of new dungeons, and will show up later on in our story. But role-playing games wouldn't find a huge audience until computers entered the home. Which they did, in 1977 when the first successful home computers were released in America. That's the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80. Commercial: "The TRS-80: The Biggest Name in Little Computers" There were a few early attempts to translate RPGs to these devices like Beneath Apple Manor and Temple of Apshai - but it took two games, both released in 1981, to really spark people's interest.

One of those games was Wizardry, by Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg. It was made - according to Woodhead - ”to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II”. You start Wizardry by collecting together a party of adventurers and equipping them with weapons and armour. Then, you drop down into a ten-storey underground maze - presented as a tiny 3D wireframe in the corner of the display.

Before long, you encounter a monster and face off in a turn-based battle. Now, you’re presented with a list of options - allowing you to attack, cast a spell, use an item, and so on. Successfully beating a monster will earn you experience points, which go towards levelling up. The other game was Ultima, published that same year and on the same platform, but developed by Richard Garriott - who was also inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, but was seemingly not exposed to those early mainframe games.

He had made some early attempts at RPGs on teletype terminals and the Apple II game Akalabeth: World of Doom, but Ultima was his standout creation. You play as a single character who ventures out to do story-based quests for Lord British. The underground dungeons look like Wizardry, with wireframe walls and monster encounters. But the outside looked very different: where Wizardry was confined to a claustrophobic subterranean crypt, the sprawling land of Sosaria stretched out in every direction, with mountains, rivers, and castles.

The game also had a hunger system, forcing you to buy and eat food to stay alive. These games and their immediate sequels, which were released once a year, really set the world on fire. Not just gaining fans - but immediately inspiring rivals and similar games from other developers. So Michael Cranford released the very Wizardry-inspired Maze Master in 1983, and followed up with The Bard's Tale in 1985. That game’s studio, Interplay, would go on to make Wasteland and Fallout, and publish Bioware’s first RPGs.

Might and Magic, released in 1986, and Dungeon Master, released in 1987, both count Ultima and Wizardry as inspirations. And the spin-off Ultima Underworld would inspire games like Deus Ex and The Elder Scrolls. Almost every computer RPG franchise can be traced back to this pair of games. But the influence actually stretched much further afield than that. In the early 1980s, the Japanese also got their first home computers, with devices like the NEC PC-8001 and Fujitsu’s FM-7.

But the coolest kids were playing imported games on Western systems - like the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata who famously had a Commodore PET. So in Computer Gaming World’s September 1985 issue, a dispatch from the NEC show in Tokyo says “as much as the Japanese enjoy hi-res graphic adventures, the pinnacle of their admiration is reserved for the fantasy role-playing games. Both Wizardry and Ultima have huge followings in Japan”.

And so, of course, there were attempts to make original, Japanese-language games in this style, for Japanese computers - such as Dungeon, and Mugen no Shinzou. Plus, The Black Onyx - made by westerner in Japan, Henk Rogers (the man who would one day introduce Nintendo to a little game called Tetris). There were also RPG hybrids and twists on the formula, like the strategy RPG Bokosuka Wars. And in 1984 we saw an explosion of action RPGs, with real-time combat - like Dragon Slayer and Tower of Druaga, both of which count Ultima and/or Wizardry as influences.

1986 gave us The Legend of Zelda, which creator Shigeru Miyamoto said was influenced by The Black Onyx and Ultima, in a 2003 interview with Enterbrain. But, going back to more standard RPGs - just like how it took the Apple II to make RPGs more popular in the west - the RPG wouldn't really take off in Japan until the nascent genre came to a more popular and accessible system. Meet Yuji Horii. He was also playing imported games, and counted himself as a fan of Western games and genres.

His first major release for publisher Enix was Portopia Serial Murder Case, and it was made after reading about western text adventures - including Deadline by Infocom. Portopia is actually seen as the defining game in the visual novel genre, and it famously inspired Hideo Kojima to start making games - including the visual novels Snatcher and Policenauts. Portopia gained even more popularity, though, when Horii teamed up with Koichi Nakamura to port the game to Nintendo's popular new system, the Famicom.

It involved squeezing a computer game into the much more limited hardware and input device of a console, but the duo managed to pull it off - with clever techniques like a command list instead of a text parser. For their next project, the pair would do the same for another western genre: the RPG. And together, they made Dragon Quest, released on Famicom in the spring of 1986. Horii was a big fan of Wizardy - saying "the idea of building up experience and getting stronger and buying new weapons.

I really love all that stuff”. And Nakamura was really into Ultima. And so the final game combines the best of both. The combat sequences were all Wizardry, with that familiar menu of options to pick from, and large, colourful sprites. But the overworld was more like Ultima, with small characters walking around, and castles and towns as single tiles on an overworld map. Dragon Quest is simplified and streamlined compared to the influential American games.

The only character choice you have is your name, and there are simple pre-determined stats and a straightforward levelling system. This was partly due to the Famicom's technical limitations - but also due to accessibility. Horii saw that RPGs were niche and complex and so he wanted to make them engaging to all, including the Famicom's younger players. The developers also wanted to make the game more approachable to a native Japanese audience.

So the dialogue is funny, irreverent, and inspired by manga. And the art is famously provided by manga artist Akira Toriyama - who had just started working on Dragon Ball, at the time. Look at how Toriyama took Horii's slime sketch - a simple retread of Wizardry's boring blob - and made it funny, characterful, and mascot-like. All of these factors made the game a success. Maybe not quite as successful as the developers expected - but it did do well enough to warrant a sequel or two.

Which is when Dragon Quest fever really took off. Each game sold millions of copies. The release of Dragon Quest III was a cultural event. There is even a story that the Japanese government created a law, forcing Enix to release new games on a Saturday or public holiday - because so many kids were skipping school to binge the latest Dragon Quest game. That's a myth. No law was enacted. But Enix did independently agree to not release these games on a school day - and that's still true today.

Dragon Quest XI was released on a Saturday in Japan. This monster success precipitated a wave of Japanese RPGs for consoles like the Famicom and Master System. That includes huge games Phantasy Star by Sega, Digital Devil Story by Atlus, and of course Final Fantasy by Square. Now the developers of these three games were also inspired by Ultima and Wizardry. And other Western games: Phantasy Star creator Yuji Naka was a big Amiga fan.

But it was the success of Dragon Quest that pushed them to release their own takes on the genre. Final Fantasy designer Hironobu Sakaguchi, for example, was inspired by Ultima and Wizardry but he couldn't get Square to green-light an RPG… until Enix proved the genre was popular with Dragon Quest. Final Fantasy was also the game that really proved that JPRGs could be popular outside of Japan, and the series has been massively successful in the west - much more so than Dragon Quest.

There were also games that were directly influenced by Dragon Quest itself, of course. After binging the first two games in the series, Shigesato Itoi has said "I found myself thinking about what kind of things I’d do if I made the same sort of game. I wondered why all the role-playing games that were popular at the time had swords and magic". So he worked with Nintendo to make Mother - the prequel to Earthbound, and a light parody of RPG tropes - something which became a whole sub genre of games in Japan.

You could also make the case for Sweet Home - which closely follows the Dragon Quest formula with its command list and turn-based battles. Many years later, that game was to be remade in 3D, but eventually Capcom decided to make it into a whole new franchise: Resident Evil. Despite their similar origins, we still delineate between Western and Japanese RPGs. That's not something we do with any other genre. There's no such thing as a Japanese platformer or a Western racing game.

But I think we only need to look at Dragon Quest to see why RPGs went on such a different path in Japan. Console limitations and a desire for accessibility lead to Dragon Quest being a simplified experience. While in the west, RPGs continued to be primarily made for computers, and largely focused on a more hardcore audience. And Dragon Quest's focus on story with a predefined character has been the mould for RPGs in the east - whereas western RPGs have typically had less of a defined narrative - and are more about role-playing a character that you design yourself.

And maybe that's because Dragon Quest was a twist on games like Wizardry - which was inspired by mainframe games, which were inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. So Dragon Quest is like a distillation of a distillation of a distillation of Dungeons & Dragons. No wonder it's the most simplified and concentrated version of the idea. Whereas, Western RPG creators were still playing D&D in great numbers, and so they could go straight to the original source and take that in whatever direction they saw fit.

Though, while it would be convenient to say that Japanese RPGs were simply games made in a world where D&D never existed - that's not true. Dungeons & Dragons was officially translated and released in Japan in 1985 - and it was influential on games such as the first Final Fantasy, inspiring the elemental attacks and character classes. Plus, some Japanese developers got access even before then, like the maker of Tower of Druaga, who picked up D&D on a business trip to America.

So, nothing is ever that cut and dry. Really, the story of the RPG video game genre is a complicated, tangled, web of influences and inspirations - leading to all sorts of different paths. I mean - just look at the story of Yuji Horii's one-time Dragon Quest partner, Koichi Nakamura. Around the time the Super Famicom was released, Nakamura left the Dragon Quest team to do his own thing. And noting that he and Horii once struck gold by making a Japanese version of a popular Western game - he sought to do the same thing again.

This time he used a weird, indecipherable PC game from America that one of his colleagues was obsessed with. That game was called Rogue. And so we get the Mystery Dungeon series. A whole bunch of games - more than 30 in total - that have random generation and permadeath. You might not know the original series, but have probably seen the spin-offs that feature other RPG franchises like Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Etrian Odyssey, and of course, Dragon Quest.

Meanwhile in the west, Rogue inspired a whole subgenre of games - before its core ideas were remixed and reinvented by a clever bunch of indie game designers. Like I said: it's a tangled web. And this YouTube series, Design Icons, is supposed to be about picking out the key individual games that have influenced game design over the past 40 years. But I can't really do that for RPGs without inducting a whole bunch of games as design icons: including Dungeons & Dragons.

Ultima. Wizardry. Dragon Quest. And Rogue. And so, I guess I'll have to do just that. As Wizardry’s Robert Woodhead explains it, these games are "nothing but rings in the chain that bind all games together". Thanks for watching. I'll see you soon.