It’s perhaps not a surprise that it would be Horii who became key to the operation - you can trace his drive for success from well before Dragon Quest was conceived.

That’s down in major part to Yuji Horii, the series’ primary creator, writer and, as Miyake puts it, “head of the fans”. I’m also fairly sure the old rule that you’re never more than 6 feet away from a rat in London applies to Slime plushies in Tokyo. Its release is a cause for celebration, hobby shops have entire swathes of space given over to its merchandise, and Luida’s Bar, the restaurant opened as a limited-time celebration of Dragon Quest IX, is now entering its eighth year of business. It’s a tradition that continues to this day – the latest game, Dragon Quest XI got its own Saturday release, over 30 years after the first game arrived.ĭragon Quest has become an implacable piece of Japanese culture, not simply a game nor even, to use a phrase that makes me a feel a bit sick, a multimedia franchise. So we arranged with Nintendo to have Dragon Quest released on a Saturday as a special exception to that.” “Basically,” explains series executive producer Yuu Miyake, “it was the general accepted practice in the industry was to have games shipped out on a Thursday, but there were kids who would skip school to go and buy the games. The developers, feeling bad for having created a nationwide issue, essentially created the Dragon Quest Law for themselves. The untrue part of the story is really only that the government had to create a law – and that’s only because it never had to.

Game of school for dragon