The Essential 50 Part 20 -- Dragon Warrior from 1UP.com

Thou Art A Hero

Every video game puts you in a role of some sort. Sometimes you're a happy plumber in overalls. Sometimes you're a lady in a cybernetic bodysuit who's secretly a robot in disguise. Sometimes you're a small white stick protecting the left side of the screen from the evil ball that's hurtling towards you. Sometimes you're Wesley Snipes. There are almost no exceptions to this rule.

So what makes role-playing games so different? If anything, they ostensibly offer a deeper experience than you can find in other games. You can customize your character, adding and removing equipment, watching him slowly grow his skill set over time. You're free to explore vast worlds, comb every last bit of every town, and plunder every dark cave or dungeon of all its treasure.

It was practically impossible to own an NES and not a copy of Dragon Warrior as well.

The difference is actually a subtle one -- instead of playing a game, you're directly involved in a story, trying to find your place or role within it. It's not a matter of starting at World 1-1 and endlessly stampeding forward until you've clawed your way to World 8-4 -- it's a matter of being yourself, and making up the story as you go along.

Of course, until Dragon Warrior premiered in Japan in 1986 (under the name Dragon Quest), this definition was far too abstract for all but a select group of computer gamers. Starting with Wizardry in the early 80s, RPGs made the jump from a bunch of college kids sitting around a table at the student union to a wireframe 3D display on your 8-inch Apple II monitor at a fairly early point in game history. Wizardry, along with Richard Garriott's Ultima (which didn't follow too long afterwards), were primarily dungeon hacks -- the story was mere decoration, a little something to divert your attention while you spent hours bashing monsters and hoping against hope that some tiny bit of dust didn't destroy your save-game disk. The Ultima series did not begin to seriously concentrate on story until the fourth installment in 1985, so up to that time, computer RPGs were often hack-'em-ups done in the classic Dungeons & Dragons tradition -- the fun was all in character building.

Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura loved these RPGs. So much, in fact, that after seeing Wizardry for the first time at a computer show in San Francisco, the two programmers went right back to Japan and bought a Macintosh so he could play it himself. Both had just won a game-design contest held by software publisher Enix, and both were about to see their first published games (a tennis sim for Horii, a puzzle game for Nakamura) enter the marketplace. They would spend the next few years writing arcade and adventure games for computers, but they never thought about making an RPG of their own -- it took too much time, and besides, the Americans already had the tiny Japanese market cornered with Wizardry and Ultima.

Like a lot of things in the game industry, this all changed with the Famicom's release in 1983 and the subsequent sales explosion in 1985. Nintendo's toy-like red and white console was the first computer hardware of any sort to sell in the millions in Japan, and it opened up a completely new way for video games to reach an audience that never really played video games before.

Behold, the playful slime -- Alefgard's most endearing form of wildlife.

It wasn't until Horii and Nakamura saw this new audience that they saw the potential for a new kind of RPG -- one that didn't rely on previous D&D; experience, one that didn't require hundreds of hours of rote fighting, but most importantly one that could appeal to any kind of gamer.

Trying to create something that has truly never existed before is always a painful experience. Horii spent most of 1985 trying to get it right, coming up with the right balance between visual flash and RPG depth and figuring out a way to cram it all into the 64K of cartridge space available to him. Fortunately, he had some very talented friends to help him out. Akira Toriyama, who had just begun drawing the Dragon Ball comic and a man Horii knew from his own days working for Japanese manga weekly Shonen Jump, was brought on to draw the game's enemies and box cover. Koichi Sugiyama, a composer for lots of Japanese TV shows, became Enix's musician after submitting a user-response card for one of Horii's previous games.

It was an incredible stroke of luck that Horii chose these two people because otherwise, Dragon Quest would never have become the million-unit seller it did without them. Toriyama's art style was something never seen before in video games -- the creatures he drew, from the humble blue slime to the most powerful rock golem, looked crafty and mischievous compared to the dark beasts described in the D&D; Monster Manual. Sugiyama's score, meanwhile, was equally a revolution for console gaming -- he took his cues from classical composers and Wagnerian opera, resulting in a soundtrack that was deeper, heavier, and emotional than any other Famicom game, despite the hardware's strict limits. It's no accident that Sugiyama continues to hold yearly orchestral performances of Dragon Warrior's music in Japan -- there are soundtracks that impress the player more, but only very few are better works of art than his work on this series.

Tiny Acorns, Great Oaks

The original Dragon Quest -- released in America as Dragon Warrior because there was already a table RPG called DragonQuest -- was built with this core staff of four people. Despite the small crew, and despite all the new things they were trying, the game they came up with was a masterpiece of design. Horii took the best parts of his two favorite RPGs -- the menu displays of Wizardry and the vast overhead displays of Ultima -- and combined them into a game system that was not simplified, but instead perfectly adjusted for the Famicom's controller.

Akira Toriyama's distinctive artwork helped turn Dragon Quest into an RPG juggernaut.

There were some simplifications made for the sake of the audience (the first Dragon Quest had no party system, and even the later ones limited conversation branching to simple yes/no questions), but this was by no means a kids' RPG. This game was challenging, and while it didn't last as long as Wizardry, the story element -- the ability to collect information bit by bit from townspeople as you hunted down the domicile of the evil Dragonlord -- made the experience far more fulfilling than almost any other console game before.

Dragon Quest would eventually sell a million and a half copies, with each sequel selling more and more. Dragon Quest III, released in 1988, broke the three-million mark in Japan and became a national phenomenon, with gamers standing in line for hours in hopes of scoring a copy. Yuji Horii became a celebrity, the country's first and foremost "Famicom author", as Enix called him. It was a phenomenon that, while not duplicated, did at least occur with Nintendo's U.S. launch of Dragon Warrior in 1989, hyping it heavily in its advertising and even giving away copies for free to people who subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine. While RPGs did not become a mainstream genre in America until the PlayStation era, Nintendo's initial push helped open gamers' eyes to the capabilities of the medium, and even now, the great majority of hardcore gamers spend the great majority of their time playing RPGs.

It's always rare to find a single turning point in history, an exact blip that changed everything. Usually it's a very gradual stream of events that brings about change, a collection of little dots that nobody notices as a trend until it's already overwhelmed the world. Dragon Warrior, however, was just one such blip. It created the "console RPG" genre, a genre that's become the foremost one in Japan and a vitally important one everywhere else, and it wouldn't have happened without Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura's taste for RPGs. If life is a role-playing game, then not only did they play it smartly -- they probably have a really high level by now.

Dragon Warrior
(aka Dragon Quest)

Platform: NES
Year: 1986 (J); 1989 (U)
Developer: Enix
Publisher: Enix/Nintendo

Landmarks:

The first true role-playing game designed specifically for a game console
Opened up RPGs to a whole new group of gamers
Singlehandedly created the Japanese style of RPG creation

Progeny:

Final Fantasy
Star Ocean
Suikoden
Lord of the Rings: The Third Age

Resources:

Dragon's Den:
Has a handy searchable bestiary, complete with portraits and treasure dropped upon dying for your cause

The DQ/DW Shrine
A timeline of every Japan and U.S. release, not to mention a great deal of I-can't-believe-it's-not-Toriyama fanart.

Alefgard Network
Streaming radio of DW tunes. Perfect for piping into the waiting room of your dentist's office.

Musings:

"My grandfather enjoys telling me what having the radio as your main entertainment medium was like in the 1940s; having the whole family grouped around the large receiver, staring at the speaker even though it wasn't strictly necessary to do so. Imagination was a prerequisite to enjoy any sort of radio drama -- since the sets and characters weren't there in front of your eyes to see for yourselves, you had to create the scene in your mind, filling in the undescribed sections as best you could. If a family was talking over breakfast, for example, it was safe to assume that the patriarch's coffee wasn't being supported by thin air -- there was a presumed table under it that the group was seated around. Any other situation seems preposterous.

"Dragon Warrior, thanks to its extremely abstract map graphics, ends up working much the same way. The only real visual luxury this game features is the first-person enemy portraits when you stumble into a battle -- otherwise, you're staring at collections of crude, rough-hewn tiles meant to represent roads, prairie, mountains, and vast oceans. Even by its U.S. release in 1989, Dragon Warrior looked like a game from another era.

"As a result, players felt obliged to fill in the holes. As my friend (let's call him Todd) and I explored Dragon Warrior to its deep, dark recesses, we couldn't help but note that you could take the world tour of Alefgard in less than an hour's time -- less if you avoid as many enemies as possible. Where was there room for all of these enemies? Didn't anybody notice when the Dragonlord was building his evil inner sanctum? We ended up rather arbitrarily deciding that one "tile" in Alefgard equaled about ten square miles in real life, which made the world just as vast in our minds as it undoubtedly was in Yuji Horii's when he was busy constructing it.

"There was also the matter of the extreme budget difficulties the King and his minions must be struggling upon. Why else would the alleged ruler of the country send me, descendant of Erdrick and savior of all that is good with the world, on my quest with nothing but a door key and a couple hundred coins? I mean, he doesn't even give you enough for decent equipment at the start of the game -- with his money, you can either afford a not-terrible weapon or not-terrible armor, but not both. Does he think I'm just some lunatic to be humored and sent off to my certain death? Pfft!

"It was all so preposterous -- beginning your grand adventure by bopping slimes on the head with your almighty bamboo pole -- but somehow we were able to work our minds past through all the abstraction. Our big brothers might have had multi-person parties and enormous 3D labyrinths to explore over on their Apples and Commodore 64s, but we had Dragon Warrior, and to us, that was more than enough to set our imaginations on fire."

Article by
Kevin Gifford

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