Yuji Horii – 2000 Developer Interview

—You were born on Awaji Island. When did you first come to Tokyo?

Horii: I went to middle and high school on Awaji Island. So I didn't come to Tokyo until college, in 1972. I had wanted to be a manga artist, you see. The manga publishing companies were all based in Tokyo, so on the summer vacation of my third year in high school, I visited Tokyo for the first time. I brought some of the manga I had drawn with me. I stayed at a boarding house, and went around visiting several manga artists. I showed up, quite unannounced, to Go Nagai's place, and he looked at my manuscript. His response of "hmmmm..." wasn't especially encouraging though. (laughs) In my mind I thought he would be like, "these are great, you start tomorrow!" Afterwards I remember feeling silly about how naïve I'd been.

—At Waseda University you joined the Manga Research Club.

Horii: I did, but not a lot of actual drawing went on there. In the name of "Manga Research" we were always playing games. The game we played the most was mahjong. Eventually we got bored of playing mahjong all the time, so we made our own tiles and played "Pei Narabe" ("North Line-up").

—Pei Narabe...?

Horii: It's a variation where the north tile replaces the seven tile. We made a lot of our own local rules up… I guess making games has always been my calling. It was right around this time that console video games started coming out. The first was Pong. I had a friend who owned it, and he let me play. I thought it was extremely fun. Then came Breakout, and after that, Space Invaders. As you might have guessed, I was very into games.

—You're also an accomplished writer. Was this manga club period of your life also the start of your writing career?

—Was it like Dokkiri Camera? 1

Horii: Exactly like that. I wrote for Itazura Camera—they called me the "mastermind" behind the show actually. So yeah, I have to say that all that attention was going to my head… I stopped going to my classes, and it ended up taking me six years to graduate. And I never did the traditional job-hunting thing either.

—You worked in a wide range of mediums, from TV to books.

Horii: Yeah. Sankei Sports had a campus column in their paper, and I also wrote a weekly report for that, mostly stuff about campus life such as part-time jobs for students or talking about the campus food.

—The column you wrote for Gekkan OUT was famous too.

Horii: Yeah, I wrote there too. I wrote that column for nine years.

—So you continued to write it even while making Dragon Quest...?

Horii: Yeah, up to Dragon Quest III or thereabouts. I would come up with all these different ideas each month for the column. There was one I really liked, where I took all these readers postcards and made short stories and pretend roundtable interviews out of them. I would use the text on the postcards as dialogue, and cut them up and arrange them in my own way to tell a story. All the writing and characters came from the postcards, I just made up the scenario… for example, the first chapter was "people on a train". The readers really got into it. I'd give a prompt like "in this chapter, the characters will be sitting around and talking in the rotenburo (open-air bath)…" and the postcards would come flooding in. (laughs) Wait, hold on one second… [Horii leaves room and comes back with a bundle of magazines]. Here they are, this is 9 years worth of columns I wrote.

—Wow! Oh I see, the theme for this one was "Let's talk in the nude." And then the conversation is created from these different postcards.

Horii: Looking at these now, I think they're a real treasure. The readers took it very seriously, coming up with all these good lines.

—Hah, look at this line: "Oooo, I'm sooo hot!" Crazy. So readers sent all these in.

Horii: Yeah, people would send in postcards with just a single line like that. Then I would take that and link it up with another line that seemed to match it. This one here was a short story. The title is a little suggestive… "Amy's Sweet Sixteen Summer" (laughs) There were lots of anime fans among the readers, as you can imagine. Quite sophisticated too. They would read the prompts I created and know what I was going for, and then send in lines like that. I remember thinking how impressive their collective intellect was.

—Switching gears to games here, but Dragon Quest is famous for its collection of pithy, memorable one-liners, which really bring the world and story to life. Do you think that's a reflection of your experience working as a writer?

Horii: I've done a lot of things in my life, and I think all of it has been helpful to me, one way or another, in making games. Though you could also say that without becoming a game designer, all that dabbling would have made me little more than a dilettante. (laughs) The dialogue I write in Dragon Quest was definitely influenced by my writing experience though. All that work in manga and freelance writing taught me how to write concise but interesting dialogue.

—When did you first encounter computers?

Horii: I read an article about how you could use a computer to help write and construct the plot of a harlequin romance. It was right around then.

—Ah, I think I remember that. It was software where you could take the various parts of a story and arrange and order them.

Horii: I was curious as to whether that was really possible, I didn't know. So I bought my first computer. I was about 28 years old. Up to then, I'd never even touched a keyboard. The computer I bought was the PC-6001. It was called the "Papikon", and in total it cost 100,000 yen (approx USD 1000.00).

—That was the heyday of the BASIC programming language. You could program your own games in BASIC, and save them to cassette tape.

Horii: The graphics were very poor. It could only display symbols like hearts and clubs, and that's how all the games were.

—Was the Enix Game Contest your first foray into game programming and design?

Horii: Actually, that was something of an amazing coincidence itself. At the time, I was working for Shueisha's Shuukan Shonen Jump. I was in charge of the Gravia movie page. It so happened that one of the editors, Kazuhiko Torishima, was himself a big fan of video games. So we got to talking about games, and he suggested we do a special feature on them.

—I remember Shonen Jump's game column was always very popular.

Horii: By chance, at that same time Enix had approached Shonen Jump about doing a report on their upcoming game contest. Eventually I got wind of this. I actually knew about the contest from before, from ads I'd seen in a computer magazine, but it was a pain to get ahold of all the application documents so I'd never applied. But when Torishima came and told me about how we were going to cover the contest, he happened to have those application docs in hand with him, so I snatched them up and decided to give it a go! I submitted a tennis game which I had already created, for the PC-6001.

—That was "Love Match Tennis", which was one of the winning submissions.

Horii: That's right. You could move your character around with the cursor keys, and press a button to swing your racket. It was the kind of simple tennis game you'd see in the arcades back then. The PC-6001 had almost no graphics capabilities. So I created almost all of it in machine language, which allowed for somewhat better graphics.

—Were you confident about it, when you submitted it?

Horii: My attitude was more like, well, it can't hurt to try! When the winners were announced I went to Enix to report on it for Shueisha, and saw that my game was among the 13 prize winners. So I was there receiving an award at the award ceremony and reporting at the same time. It's ridiculous, I know. (laughs) I wrote the report myself too. (laughs)

—Koichi Nakamura, who would go on to make Dragon Quest with you, also won second place in that contest.

Horii: He was already famous among PC users. I knew his name from reading I/O magazine.

—So how did you go from receiving an award in the Enix contest to making Dragon Quest...?

Horii: After being selected in the Enix contest, everyone's games got published. It sold alright. So I started thinking about my next game to release, because all of a sudden they were asking me to make another game. They said they didn't care what it was either. Up to now I'd only ever made games for myself to play, and they were mainly action based. But I'd read that report on using computers to write harlequin romances, and it got me thinking that I'd like to try writing something on a computer myself. Around that time I read an article about how people overseas were making "adventure games", and that sounded interesting. And so the game that came about from all these musings was The Portopia Serial Murder Case.

—The big plot twist at the end of Portopia is very famous. Did you work up that story all by yourself?

Horii: The thing is, there was no master scenario or script for Portopia. I wrote it all myself, and programmed it myself too. Which meant that I created it piece by piece, working it out as I went: "ok, I'll make this guy say this here, and this will happen here, and…" So the programming is, well… it's not quite spaghetti but it's a mess. There's stuff pasted and patched on all over the place.

—Portopia was released right in the middle of the Japanese adventure game boom.

Horii: That's why it was so well-received. For it's time, it was a fairly revolutionary game. It essentially played like an episode of Nihon TV's Kayou Suspense Gekijou (Tuesday Suspense Theatre).

—After Portopia, you went on to create the adventure games Karuizawa Yuukai Annai and Okhotsk ni Kiyu.

Horii: The Okhotsk project has a funny origin. After I finished Portopia, Shiozaki-san from ASCII (the publisher of Login magazine) came out to interview me, during the interview we bonded over a shared love of crab. I said I was making a game, and he jokingly invited me to Hokkaido. I kind of blurted out "Let's do it!" without thinking, and we ended up actually making Okhotsk ni Kiyu. It was the first time I'd done any actual location scouting for a game.

—Reading the articles in LOGiN, I got the impression that Okhotsk had a very long development, with a larger staff.

Horii: It was my first time dividing up the labor in a development. I wrote the scenario.

—Karuizawa was a strange adventure game. Would you call it a transitional work, on your way to Dragon Quest?

Horii: Karuizawa, yeah… it turns into a role-playing game in the latter half. (laughs) I was really obsessed with Wizardry and Ultima when I was making Karuizawa. In an adventure game, if you get stuck on a puzzle, you're just stuck, and you can't do anything until you figure it out. But in a role-playing game, if you put in the work and get stronger you can manage to progress. I really liked that about RPGs.

—As a computer user, what did you think when the Famicom debuted?

Horii: I was writing about games for Shonen Jump when the MSX and Famicom came out. But our readers were far and away more interested in the Famicom games. People were especially amazed at the beautiful graphics of Donkey Kong. "Wow, you can play that at home now?!"

—It was revolutionary for its time.

Horii: Gradually, more and more Famicom cartridges were being released. I was super into Wizardry at the time, so I started talking to Nakamura-kun about possibly making an RPG for the Famicom. However, I believe Yukinobu Chida of Enix told him that "people aren't ready for an RPG on the Famicom yet." Hearing that, Nakamura instead suggested that he could port Portopia to the Famicom. I said OK, let's do that then. But the Famicom didn't have a keyboard, so we had to create a menu with a selectable list of actions instead.

—Portopia really surprised Famicom users though.

Horii: Yeah, at the time, the Famicom was nothing but action games, so an adventure game was very fresh. I was still writing for Shonen Jump then, by the way, and I wrote the article introducing Portopia myself! (laughs)

—That's incredible, writing the magazine article for the game you made yourself.

Horii: I did the same thing for Dragon Quest. While we were making Dragon Quest, I wrote articles in Shonen Jump to promote and introduce the idea of RPGs to readers. "Now get ready to try an RPG on the Famicom!" … "Role-playing games are amazing, here's why!" I thought it was important that readers had an idea what kind of game it was when it came out.

—How did Akira Toriyama end up doing illustrations for you?

Horii: His editor at Shonen Jump was Kazuhiko Torishima. Apparently Toriyama was a big fan of Portopia. Knowing this, I think Torishima felt that it would be a big help to Toriyama's career and name if he tried his hand at games, too. So Torishima came to me and said "Toriyama wants to work on this." But get this: later Toriyama confessed to me, "I never said that. Torishima ordered me to do it." (laughs)

—I've heard that Koichi Sugiyama was also a passionate game fan.

Horii: Yeah, the Dragon Quest team all happened to like games.

—In an era when the public consciousness of role-playing games was very low, I feel Dragon Quest created the grammar of Japanese role-playing games.

Horii: Yeah. It was the first role-playing game on the Famicom, so we put a great deal of care into it. Making it easy for people to understand, I mean.

—What amazed me more than anything was the whole "fukkatsu no jumon" (spell of restoration) system.

Horii: Yeah, the Famicom back then still didn't have any other way to continue your game. So we used a 5-7-5-7-7 tanka for the password. (laughs)

—You created all the maps, and wrote the scenario and story. The way the story is explained in dialogue almost makes it feel like manga to me. Do you think writing for RPGs is similar to writing for manga?

Horii: The story is constructed solely through dialogue. That is just like manga, as you said. In those days, I was coming up with ideas left and right. Being my first foray into this kind of thing, there was all sorts stuff I wanted to try. It ultimately was a very small game, of course, the first Dragon Quest.

—There's a lot of fine detail in there. Like when you take Princess Lola to an inn after rescuing her... you know, Dragon Quest has this reputation as being a very straightlaced, earnest game, but when I play it now I realize there's actually a lot of provocative stuff going on. (laughs)

Horii: Oh yeah. There's a lot of dirty stuff. (laughs)

—The names of the magic spells are also gags, right?

—The way the status window pops open feels like it was a Macintosh inspiration.

Horii: I think so too. Nakamura was very into Macs. He thought they looked so cool, and would say how he wanted to do something like that. That was the inspiration for the status "window" system.

—How did you feel on Dragon Quest's release day?

Horii: I was looking forward to seeing how it would go. There was a possibility it might flop, but if it succeeded I thought it could be huge. I guess my feelings were split 50/50 on which it would be, and I wanted to hurry up and release it. It was kind of like a chef who makes a dish. After we completed it, it was like "Well… how is it?"

—The first Dragon Quest sold slowly but surely, and eventually reached over 1.5 million sales. The sequel, Dragon Quest II, included many new features.

Horii: The first Dragon Quest was a very small game, so there were many things we had to abandon. I had wanted to have party play even in the first game, and vehicles too. From the beginning, therefore, we had a lot of ideas for DQII (if we were going to make it). But I felt it would be overwhelming to players to start the game with a party all of a sudden, so we made it so you have to search for your companions and gradually increase the size of your party.

—The phenomenon of people lining up at stores on Dragon Quest release days began with DQII, correct?

Horii: DQIII was the peak for that. DQI was a hit among RPG maniacs, then DQII expanded things a bit further with word of mouth, but DQIII is where it really became a bonafide social phenomenon. Sometimes I think role-playing games are a kind of drug.

—I heard you would go out yourself to see the people lined up.

Horii: I did, yeah. When it gets that big it feels surreal, like "did we really do all this?"

—DQIII was very popular too.

Horii: In a sense, by DQIII I'd done everything I originally wanted to do. And that made DQIV the first time I experienced real writer's block. "Where can we possibly go from here…"

—DQIV has a five-part structure, and the first chapter, where you play Ragnar solo, feels like a callback to DQI. Then chapter two with Alena and her two companions is like DQII, and chapter 4 feels like DQIII... it's almost like you're revisiting the history of the series as you play it.

Horii: Yeah, I really racked my brain to come up with that omnibus format.

—With DQV, the hardware changes to the Super Famicom. With more memory the expressive possibilities expanded, and the story also got longer and bigger. The standout feature of DQV, of course, is the Taiga drama-esque three-generation story. There's even a marriage in the middle of the game.

Horii: My goal with the marriage event was to really make players struggle over that choice. There are two people you can marry… who do you pick?!

—Starting around IV, V, and VI, there started to be more events, with more emphasis placed on the story. The Dragon Quest series also is compared to Final Fantasy a lot.

Horii: I think Final Fantasy is perfectly good the way it is. The Final Fantasy games are "visual role-playing games" where you enjoy the spectacle of the graphics and story. Dragon Quest, on the other hand, is a hands-on, "do it yourself" role-playing game, aimed at people who want to experience and play through all those events.

—When you ask someone what their favorite Dragon Quest game is, it's interesting how everyone says something different. It must be a reflection of their individual personalities. What do you think is the most well-made Dragon Quest game?

Horii: I have a lot of attachment to III, IV, and V. I think DQIII has a simplicity which is appealing to a lot of people, and that's reflected in all the different ports it has had. We haven't done a remake of DQIV yet, which is something I'd personally like to do.

—I think Dragon Quest has become your life's work. I've noticed that with each game, though, the developments get longer and longer.

Horii: Yeah, the stories have gotten too big. I think it's a consequence of having more data to available to us. With DQVII it's just become this gigantic game, and the scenario manuscript had 16000 pages…!

—How many pages was DQI...?

Horii: About 50. (laughs)

—That's 320 times larger.

Horii: We have so much more memory available to us now. Back then, there was only 512kb to work with, but now it's two discs with 640MB each. So that's given us a lot of room to experiment with, but one thing we hear from the fans whenever we try and do something different is "That's not Dragon Quest!"

—In our interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, he remarked that a creator's personality and style come out in the finishing touches to a game. You've said that you fine-tune and adjust the balance on Dragon Quest games up to the very last minute. Does that habit go back to the first game?

Horii: Yeah. In the first Dragon Quest, it took too long for your first level up. I thought it would be better if you gained a level right away, at 7 experience points, and it would make things easier for players to understand. Also, if you allow players to go anywhere from the outset, they won't know where to go, and they may wander into some difficult place and get slaughtered by the enemies there. That's why I locked the exit from the king's room in the beginning. You have to use the "Talk" and "Search" commands, and it teaches players the basic controls. I made a lot of adjustments and revisions of that nature, in order to help players learn the rules of this type of game.

—The latter half of DQII is known for being very difficult. The monsters are tough, and a lot of people didn't make it to the final boss.

Horii: It's true, and the reason is that I simply ran out of time. I was able to fine-tune the first part of the game, and the ending, but we did almost no tuning of Rhone. On the other hand, a lot of people loved how unforgiving it was. (laughs) But yeah, after persevering through all those pitfalls in the Cave to Rhone and emerging on the other side, at the first encounter the enemies are spamming zaki (Defeat/Whack) left and right. (laughs) Now that was brutal.

—Lately role-playing games have been getting easier and easier, to the point where you almost can't die. Dragon Quest, in comparison, will sometimes have you battling for your life with a slime. Death is never far.

Horii: If there's no thrill, you won't appreciate the feeling of getting stronger, you know? But striking the right balance there is very tough. It's a delicate thing that's hard to capture.

—When you get that balancing just right, can you feel it? Like, "This is it!"

Horii: Yeah, I do. In the beginning, nothing is balanced at all. Sometimes its the case that there's simply no tension because the enemies don't do enough damage. And other times they're so strong it's impossible to make any headway. I always make those adjustments myself, by hand. I testplay those parts over and over, making small adjustments until I'm satisfied. The monster's stats are all contained in an Excel spreadsheet, and I make revisions there and then send it to the programmers. Then I do it all again.

—I can see what you mean about making adjustments down to the last minute.

Horii: It's that final measurement that defines whether an RPG will be good or not. I really am working up to the 11th hour.

—Now that you're working with the Playstation, do you still struggle with memory constraints?

Horii: Yes. The Playstation uses high-capacity CD-ROMs, but ultimately it can only read about 2MB worth of data at a time.

—It sounds like not much has changed since the days of fighting with the Famicom's limited memory, then.

Horii: Yeah, whenever the data won't fit we have to try this-and-that to make it work. It's because I love these games myself. I consider myself the "number one" player, if you will, and I'm always trying to do something that I personally find interesting. "Oh, wouldn't it be cool to do this here…!" I still have that excitement.

—You are still writing too.

Horii: Well, you know, since I came from the publishing world there's a lot of work that I can't refuse. (laughs) When an old acquantice asks a favor of me, it's hard for me to say no. In truth, I'm very busy and I'd really rather not, but…

—On the list of wealthiest people in Japan, your profession is given as Game Designer, but when did that become your main work?

Horii: Around Dragon Quest IV. Up until DQIII, I was still a mainly freelance writer. I had more writing work up to then.

—Back then, there was very little public awareness of "game designers". I'd say the only other person who people recognized in that role, aside from yourself, was Masanobu Endo, the creator of Xevious.

Horii: I was fortunate to have crossed paths with Enix when I did. They were a dedicated publisher—they developed nothing in-house. So in that sense, the relationship between myself and Enix was not unlike that of a writer and a publishing company. From the start, they never paid a salary or anything, just royalties.

—I think that system actually made it easier for you to call yourselves "game designers". Enix had a knack for digging up talent, starting with yourself and Nakamura.

Horii: In that sense, they embraced us as authors, signed contracts with us as authors, and gave us freedom to create what we wanted. Being a publisher really is amazing, I think. There's this approach where they treat their creations as "works" rather than "products."

—More and more companies are starting to treat their games that way, emphasizing the creators and their creations.

Horii: The game industry has diversified to a big degree, incorporating people from all different fields. But those newcomers don't understand programming, so I think it's critical that you have someone who can bridge those gaps. It's best to understand things yourself, of course, but there's people for whom that's just not possible.

—These newer game consoles use such cutting edge technology, they're practically black boxes to the layperson.

Horii: I think understanding the underlying logic and structure is enough. That allows you to talk meaningfully with the programmers. When the technology gets in the way of realizing your ideas, that knowledge will allow you to come up with alternatives. In my case, I know a lot, so when I'm told we don't have enough memory, I'm able to talk with them about where the shortage is, and how we could optimize the data to make more space.

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