
The Eidansha Boshu Service Center was a company founded in Japan by Yasuhiro Fukushima in 1975. They mainly published tabloid magazines with real estate advertisements. When the service center failed to establish a retail chain, Mr. Fukushima transformed his business into a software development company dedicated to gaming in 1982, renaming it Enix. To search for talented programmers, they held a contest, styling it after manga competitions. It was advertised in various manga and computer publications, and winners would be awarded one million yen. One of the winning entrants was Yuji Horii, who managed to place with his sports game, Love Match Tennis.
Mr. Horii had purchased his first computer one year earlier, learning to program with it through the process of modifying other games. Around this time, he read a PC magazine and discovered a budding genre from the United States known as adventure games – a movement largely spearheaded by Ken and Roberta Williams, the founders of On-Line Systems. Their 1980 debut title, Mystery House, was groundbreaking in that it was the first such game to feature graphics, depicting objects and actions onscreen as opposed to describing it in text. Mr. Horii then noticed that the Japanese gaming scene lacked such games and decided to create one of his own. Developed using BASIC programming language, the result of this effort was The Portopia Serial Murder Incident. The goal of this game was to solve a locked-room mystery involving the death of a successful bank’s president, and the story develops through the players’ commands. Owing to its novel concept, Mr. Horii’s game was met with a warm reception, selling nearly 700,000 copies. Its impact was such that it defined a completely new genre of first-person adventure games known as the visual novel and even inspired other people, such as Hideo Kojima, to enter the industry.
While developing Portopia, Mr. Horii, alongside another contest winner, a programming prodigy who gained fame while still in high school named Koichi Nakamura, discovered Wizardry, a series of pioneering computer role-playing games (RPGs), at a Macworld Conference & Expo. As Mr. Horii enjoyed the game’s depth and visuals, elements of the dungeon crawling mechanics present in Wizardry made their way into Portopia, but once he finished that project, he had a new goal in mind: to expose the Japanese gaming scene to what was, at the time, an purely Western genre. To this end, he sought to have his game released on Nintendo’s Famicom console, believing it to be the ideal platform because players could start each session from where they last left off. To ensure that Mr. Horii’s game would reach a large audience, Akira Toriyama, best known as the artist of the highly popular manga, Dragon Ball, was hired to produce concept art. Its name was Dragon Quest, and it would go on spawn sequels, eventually becoming one of the most beloved series of RPGs in its native homeland.
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