In 1983, Yuji Horii released a murder-mystery adventure for personal computers called Portopia Serial Murder Case. At a demonstration of it, someone typed a word the program had not expected. Nothing happened. The screen gave no answer at all. Horii later said he hated that.
He was twenty-nine and had not trained as a programmer. He was a freelance writer who had bought a personal computer to sort the reader letters that came to a magazine he worked on. Games had reached him sideways, through a contest, a column and a few new acquaintances. That may be why he watched the screen the way a stranger would.
So he changed how the player speaks to the game. In place of a blank line where you had to guess the right words, the game showed a list of commands, and you picked one. Nothing you could choose would be a word the game did not know. When Portopia came to the Famicom in 1985, it carried that list with it.
Horii has said why he put an adventure on the Famicom first: RPGs were hard, so he wanted players to get used to a game made of text before he asked them for more. He had been playing American computer RPGs such as Ultima and Wizardry, and he thought a game played slowly, at home, on a television could carry one.
He has also described what made him leave the adventure behind. In an adventure game, a player can get stuck on one puzzle with no way forward. Making the puzzle easier let people finish without effort. In an RPG, a player grows a character, so even simple steps keep them playing for hours. He wanted to add a story to that and let the player be the one it happened to.
Dragon Quest went on sale on May 27, 1986. The Famicom gave him 64 kilobytes to work with. The game opens in a king's room, where the first thing you do is talk to the king. Horii has said he does not read manuals, either for computers or for games, and he built the first game so that no one had to. At CEDEC in 2009 he said: 'The hardest thing is not knowing what to do.'
At the same talk he named the player he feared most. Rendered in English, it was the person who does not understand how to play, decides 'I'm not cut out for games,' and goes away without a word, never to come back. That player never writes a complaint. No chart shows the moment they stop. The only way to meet them is to imagine them while you are still making the game.
Dragon Quest III went on sale on February 10, 1988, a weekday. Queues of schoolchildren formed outside shops, police took students in for questioning in Tokyo, and the education authorities asked schools to stop pupils skipping class. Enix moved its later releases to Saturdays. Whatever else was behind it, the door had been made wide enough for a great many people.
Somewhere near you, someone may have stopped trying because no one told them where to start. Did you notice the day they went quiet?