Yuji Horii

Yuji Horii (堀井 雄二, Horii Yūji, also written as Yuuji Horii; born January 6, 1954 in Awaji Island, Japan) is a Japanese video game designer and scenario writer best known as the creator of the Dragon Quest series. A giant among industry veterans, he created the blueprint for the console role-playing game through his work on the Portopia series and the original Dragon Quest. He is the sole owner of the Dragon Quest series via his private company, Armor Project, which has an exclusive publishing contract with Square Enix.

Biography

Early Life

Yūji Horii was born to a family of glass artisans in Sumoto city of the Hyogo prefecture, helping in the family store during Summer. When he was young he alternated between wanting to be a manga-ka (cartoonist) or a lawyer, deciding by high school that manga was more practical than legal affairs. Horii's dedication to this career path was so great that, in his own words, he traveled to Tokyo during his third year and "barged into the office of Go Nagai and requested to be made his assistant". After being politely turned down, the young Yūji considered his options and decided to join a Manga Kenkyu-kai, a circle of manga enthusiasts, under the assumption that working a regular job and being an artist would be too difficult and that being a student would allow him to draw as much as he liked.

After graduating high school Horii applied for admittance to Waseda University in 1972, which stood out to the young man for its strong reputation as the school of humanities and social sciences of it's era. During his time at Waseda Horii would join the university's Kenkyu-kai, serving as an editor and writer for a biannual magazine called Waseda-man. During university festivals, he would help gather funds for the magazine by drawing street portraits for 50 yen. Horii would meet and befriend the late Yoshihiro Yonezawa, who would go on to create comiket, at such a festival and Waseda-man is still sold at the comic market to this day.

Due to the nation-wide students protests of 1972, as well as the murder of Daisaburo Kawaguchi, the administrative staff of Waseda effectively shut the campus down for an entire year. This abundance of free time allowed Horii to build stronger friendships with his classmates, many of whom would go on to enter the entertainment industry and hire him to write articles for their magazines. Horii would work as a professional free-lance writer during his six year stay at Waseda, producing content for a variety of avenues such as the daily newspaper Sankei Sports and Katsura Bunshi VI’s television program Itazura kamera da! Daiseiko. His focus on free-lancing was also influenced by a serious motorcycle accident in his fourth student year that severely damaged several internal organs and prohibited anything more strenuous than operating a type-writer, actively forbidding him from pursuing a more typical vocation during his six month recovery period.

Post-graduation Career

In early 1981 Horii read an article in one of the magazines he wrote for that detailed the then-upcoming rise of microcomputer systems and how they were expected to affect the daily life of the common individual. Having considered himself to be competent at mathematics and not being intimidated by the user-unfriendly campus computer at Waseda, Horii opted to purchase a model for himself.

After reaching the limits of the built-in word processing program Horii began to explore the capabilities of the machine, teaching himself BASIC as he went along. The idea of creating a game of his own dawned on Horii as he played through various bits of software that were available at the time, such as an early Nobunaga's Ambition title and a licensed Star Trek game. The most realized of these early efforts was Love Match Tennis (ラブマッチテニス), which Horii would enter into an Enix-sponsored programming contest he was reporting on in 1983. Much to his surprise, he discovered his title had placed second when he arrived to report on the awards ceremony. It was there that he met Kōichi Nakamura, whose DOOR-DOOR (ドアドア) had won first place. The two became fast friends, and decided to work together in the growing world of entertainment software.

Horii's first success at Enix was the Portopia serial murder case, released in June of 1983. The game is a screen-by-screen adventure that tasked the player with unraveling the mysterious circumstances of a violent murder in the eponymous seaside town. The title proved to be a watershed moment for the young Horii, garnering him well deserved respect at Enix thanks to the sophisticated title being written, designed, and programmed by just himself.

The Road to Dragon Quest

In October of 1983, Enix sent Horii and Nakamura to Applefest; a trade show hosted by Apple computers in San Fransisco that allowed attendees to sample new business software, see emerging computer architecture, and demo computer games being developed. It was here that Horii encountered his first RPGs--Ultima and Wizardry. Having never seen a game of this kind before, where success depended on strategy and thorough planning rather than quick reflexes, Horii became so enamored with the seemingly endless mysteries of the games that he purchased Apple II-compatible hardware immediately upon his return to Japan just to play them. 1983 would also see the launch of the Famicom hardware by Nintendo, marketed as a more affordable alternative to the traditional computer that was compatible with ports of the company's popular arcade games. Horii continued to work on traditional computers during the first few years of the Famicom's existence, but kept an eye on the rising star hardware nonetheless thanks to it's break out success.

Horii would commit to the Famicom on November 29 1985 by porting Portopia to the platform, aided Nakamura's personal studio Chunsoft. The Famicom version of the title marked the first time the two friends worked together on a commercial product, and the game immediately gained attention thanks to the machine's software library primarily being action titles. Notable is that the Famicom controller possessed only four buttons and necessitated the ditching the keyboard-based input structure of the original in favor of the intuitive command menu found in it's sequel, The Hokkaidō Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance (オホーツクに消ゆ), released earlier in 1984. Every action a player needed to make in the game was easily accessible from the command menu instead of being assigned to a specific keyboard key in a disjointed fashion, greatly streamlining the experience. The Famicom version of Portopia would eclipse the original computer version's sales figures by selling 600,000 copies in the first year and reaching 800,000 copies by 1989.

With the success of the Famicom port of Portopia, proving that a "slow game" can dominate the sales charts in an action game market, Horii and Nakamura agreed that the timing was right to begin development of the Famicom's first genuine RPG. After a lengthy process of convincing Enix supervisor Yukinobu Chida of the project's potential for success, the unnamed project was given the greenlight to begin development with Horii as sole scenario writer and Nakamura as lead programmer through Chunsoft. Instead of the common Wizardry clones that saturated the computer market in America, the two decided to combine the best aspects of both the aforementioned series and it's chief competitor Ultima and eliminate the largest design flaws of both in the process. To accomplish this it was decided to use the simple menu-driven command system of the Famicom Portopia, the first-person battle screen of Wizardry, and the bird's-eye view map exploration of Ultima. Development would officially begin in November of 1985 with a staff of five men.

As development on the unnamed RPG continued, Horii was working as a copywriter for a video game section within Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. This section, titled Famicom Shinken (ファミコン神拳) after the popular manga Fist of the North Star, was edited by Horii's friend Kazuhiko Torishima. The two had bonded over games after being introduced by their mutual friend Akira Sakuma and previously wrote articles for Monthly OUT, which led to Torishima contracting Horii to write for Famicom Shinken. As luck would have it, working with Torishima would catapult Horii's RPG project into becoming a cornerstone of Japanese culture in just a few short years: Famicom Shinken was facing fierce competition from the video game section of rival magazine CoroCoro comics and needed something to give Shonen Jump a sales advantage. After a period of brainstorming, Torishima concluded that the magazine's young readers would want to learn of how games are made and, having already known of Horii's passion project, convinced his superiors within upper management to dedicate page space to the title.

As an extra incentive to sweeten the deal, Torishima used his authority as the editor of the Dragon Ball manga to assign Akira Toriyama to the project as the artist was under a very strict publishing contract that only allowed his work to be printed through Shueisha. This guaraunteed that Shonen Jump would have the best coverage of the game legally possible, and Horii suddenly found his RPG was getting attention via one of the most widely-circulating magazines in Japan in addition to being personally illustrated by one of the most popular artists in the world.

Coincidentally, acclaimed composer Kōichi Sugiyama had filled out a consumer response card packaged in the back of an Enix-published game called Kazuo Morita's Shogi (森田和郎の将棋), and was quickly approached by an Enix representative for the possibility of composing the music for the company. One of these games was Horii's RPG, now formally titled Dragon Quest, on Chida's suggestion after being personally disappointed with the soundtrack composed by Chunsoft. With this, Horii found his game being carried forward by two luminaries of their respective fields.

After a rough development period and countless hours contemplating the feedback of Enix staff and playtesters, Dragon Quest was released on May 27th, 1986. Sales were slow at first, but strong word of mouth and a healthy advertising campaign in Shonen Jump magazine lead to a steady increase throughout the year, selling 1.5 million copies in total before production of the cartridge ceased in the early 90's. The title was an unprecedented sensation in Japan, leading to a cultural craze that lead to a boom of interest not only in RPG software, but tales of swords & sorcery, European myths and culture, and fantasy literature. For all this influence on his country's zeitgeist, Horii has remained a humble man, happy to give players new quests to venture out on as long as he can.

Approach to Design Philosophy

Cohesive, condensed conveyance of information is the cornerstone of Horii's design philosophy, a result of his experiences as an amateur manga artist. The difficulty in balancing the amount of information being presented to a reader with the limited amount of page space available was greatly influential to the man, and Horii found his experiences with such spacial limitations to be analogous to the data limits of early computer software.

Actual scenario writing is a smooth process for the man, though he admits to requiring a long time to build up motivation to begin in the first place. From a general theme and setting the finer details of a game emerge, and from that point onwards more details are added until a complete picture is formed. Prior to Dragon Quest VIII, Horii would write every line of dialogue for his games, even down to nameless NPCs. This is why each title in the series feels familiar and consistent, even when separated by thirty years of hardware advancement.

Horii's views on the Series

• Favorite games: III (gameplay) and V (story narrative).
• Most profound moments in the series: Marriage and Gold Orb exchange in V, Chapter 5 opening in IV, being king for a day in Romaria in III, searching for the lost luminaries in II.
• Favorite characters: Pankraz, Bianca, Maya, Alena.
• Favorite monsters: Slime and Barbatos.
• Favorite item: Sage's stone.
• Least liked items: Kerplunk bracer, Dieamend.
• Most hated dungeons: Galen's grave in 'DQ' and the Cave to Rendarak in II.

Other works

Horii wrote the scenario and served as supervisor for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom in Japan) game, Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger had multiple game endings and Horii himself appeared in one of the endings alongside the game development staff.

He is on the selection committee for the annual Super Dash Novel Rookie of the Year Award.

Horii has visited the United States twice to promote the North American releases of Dragon Quest. He appeared at the Nintendo World Store in New York City in 2010 for the release of Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, and again on February 12, 2011 at the Palo Alto, California GameStop for the Valenslime release of Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation.

Trivia

• Horii describes himself as a mischievous man, and finds that shocking and surprising players to be one of the most rewarding parts of his career as a game designer.
• Though admittedly his skills have deteriorated since his college days, Horii draws a Slime as part of his signature when signing autographs.
• On July 15th, 2017, a bronze statue depicting a slime, alongside the sword and shield of Erdrick, was built in Sumoto city of Hyogo prefecture to celebrate Horii as one of the city's finest sons.
• In Dragon Quest VIII, an infamous king slime is named Hori, presumably after Yūji Horii.
• In Dragon Quest Treasures a King slime named after and voiced by Yuji Horii himself can be recovered by entering the code YUB. This marks the first and only time where Yuji Horii’s voice is heard in the Dragon Quest series as well as his first and only voice role in any video game.

Gallery

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  Yuji Horii, Akira Toriyama and Hironobu Sakaguchi.

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  Yuji Horii with Legend of Zelda creator, Shigeru Miyamoto.

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  Yuji Horii and Final Fantasy creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi.

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  Yuji Horii and Metal Gear creator, Hideo Kojima

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  Yuji Horii with Masahiro Sakurai and Junichi Masuda

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  Yuji Horii and Yakuza creator, Toshihiro Nagoshi.

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  Yuji Horii and his daughter Marina and son Nanpei.

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  Yuji Horii and Kōichi Sugiyama at Awaji Island.

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  The fabled Dream Team, consisting of Horii, Akira Toriyama, and Hiranobo Sakaguchi for Chrono Trigger

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  Yuji Horii at the Nintendo Store in New York City.

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  Yuji Horii and Kōichi Nakamura.

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External Links

• Yuji Horii's personal website
• An interview conducted by current members of Waseda's Kenkyu-kai
• an archive of part 1 of the above interview

• part 2

• Wikipedia article on Yūji Horii