Dragon Quest

"As a prize for winning a contest, Enix took me to the Apple Fest in San Francisco. Wizardry happened to be there, and I bought it on the spot, brought it home, and started playing right away. From there... I was completely hooked!" Yuji Horii said this in 2023, in a conversation with Wizardry's creator, Robert Woodhead. Translating a complex CRPG into the Famicom's D-pad and command windows — within a 64-kilobyte capacity, with only twenty katakana characters available, in his own words — the play of levels and experience points became the language of Japanese living rooms. I should note that some research has raised questions about the fine details of this encounter story, including whether he really "discovered" Wizardry on that US trip, and this map draws its line only from the scale of influence he has repeatedly, publicly claimed. The following year, 1987, Final Fantasy grew from the same source, and Japanese-made RPGs became a two-wheeled cart. The children of this translation would, in time, cross back over the ocean.