40 years ago Dutch expatriate Henk Rogers made a Wizardry-like specifically for the Japanese PC gaming audience that fit right into the tremendous tapestry of a young JRPG industry ready to kick into high gear.
Depending on who you ask, the Japanese RPG industry fell out of the sky fully-formed when Yuji Horii discovered Ultima and Wizardry while on a trip to San Francisco, returned home to Japan, and rallied the fledgling game studio Chunsoft into a frenzy to create Dragon Quest. They may then tell you that within the next year Square would release their rival Famicom game, Final Fantasy. The real nerds of this bunch will also mention that exactly two days later, Sega would kick out Phantasy Star for the Master System. The JRPG class of ‘86-’87 would pave the way for generation after generation of console-based role-playing games from Japan.
Another story involves a Dutch-Indonesian man named Henk Rogers who saw a glaring hole in the Japanese game market in 1983 and left Hawaii for Japan to fill that gap. Now Henk Rogers would go on to liberate Tetris and its creator from the non-royalty-paying clutches of the Soviet Union and, once free of the Iron Curtain, would make outlandish fortunes by litigating the hell out of rival tetromino games as the co-founder of The Tetris Company, but before that he was going to change the face of Japanese gaming forever.
The Black Onyx is a game that is ultimately a Wizardry-clone made exclusively for the Japanese market at a time when the lack of compatibility between PCs was high and the Apple II market penetration in Japan was low. Wizardry would take time to localize and port, and Henk Rogers jumped on the opportunity to bring turn-based, party-driven dungeon crawling to Japan first.
And for all intents and purposes, 40 years ago this month, The Black Onyx was released in Japan. An initial commercial flop thanks to Rogers’ getting screwed by his distributor, it would go on to sell 150,000 copies, become a massive influence, and inspire Japanese game developers and audiences into an era of JRPG frenzy.
Both of these are absolutely stories you can hear, if you spend long enough in JRPG circles. And neither one is exactly true.
40 years ago The Black Onyx came out and it did expose a lot of gamers in 1980s Japan to Wizardry-like gameplay. But companies like Namco, Nihon Falcom, and T&E Soft were already busy looking at games like Wizardry, Ultima, and playing tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons (which wouldn’t officially get released in Japan until 1985)
If you go digging on the Internet, if you ask colleagues who spend time working and partying with the developers from this era, or even read books with dozens of interviews one thing you’ll find is that The Black Onyx rarely comes up.
History and Legacy are difficult. But only because there’s a part of our mammalian brain that loves hagiographies and iconoclasts, that feels good when we can establish a single causal timeline, and pin down world firsts. The world is so rarely reducible.
The birth of the modern JRPG industry and the audience it created and feeds is the work of countless individuals; it spans multiple generations of consoles AND people. To hang it all on one game, even if that game was voted GOTY by Login magazine in 1984, is to misunderstand how industries, culture, and people are shaped.
40 years ago The Black Onyx was a big deal. But it wasn’t the only big deal. 40 years ago The Black Onyx laid the foundation for RPGs in Japan. But it did so alongside other games as well.
Legacy is difficult and fraught. So instead of trying to pin everything to one point in time, let’s take a look at five JRPGs that came before, during, and immediately after The Black Onyx and how they all reflect and inform each other.
Panorama Island (Falcom, 1983)
There are probably a half-dozen ways to make a game about an adventurer going to a tropical island to rid it of monsters that most developers would think of naturally. Ultima and Wizardry presented two early and obvious answers that with just a little bit of aesthetic re-targeting would work. You could make a side-scrolling action game. A text-adventure with turn-based tactical combat like Koei’s The Dragon & Princess. Or you could do what Yoshiyo Kiya did before making Dragon Slayer: make Panorama Island.
Panorama Island presents players with a window broken into five screens. The majority of the screen is a gridded overhead projection of the titular island. Small icons represent things like jungle spaces, grassland, caves or villages. One specifically represents the player character. Beneath that are windows displaying character statistics, directions and actions the player can take. There is an indicator for time. And then there’s one strange little box in the corner where the action happens, such as players encountering enemies, jumping (or falling into traps), and collecting fruit from trees. When a player enters a dungeon, a pseudo-3D first person crawl begins, much like (and likely borrowed from) Wizardry. Towns are represented in an almost ZZT or Rogue-like way, but they are complete and robust with vendor NPCs.
Everything about Nihon Falcom’s Panorama Island is fascinating and deserving of careful study. It’s not just one of the earliest examples of the budding JRPG industry flexing its colossal, leathery wings. Nor is it just a technological marvel that clearly demonstrates the hardware capabilities Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead could only dream about while programming Wizardry for the Apple II. This is a genre spanning game with a sometimes confounding but also unique approach to solving interface concerns.
Hydlide (T&ESoft, 1984)
An entire generation of gamers raised on the videos and opinions of Disgraced YouTubers and Performatively Angry Guys will tell you that early JRPG Hydlide is bad. But they are wrong. Others have sob stories about the trauma and disappointment they experienced renting this at the dodgy independent video store near their dad’s bachelor apartment because it was this or Choplifter. Again. And there was no instruction manual to explain anything. But most people just want to repeat the same anecdote about how the one song in the game is a rip-off of the Indiana Jones Theme from YouTube gamer dudes who would rather make boring dunks than be intellectually curious. But they’re all wrong (okay, the overworld track is a low key rip-off, but so are a ton of Final Fantasy XIV‘s songs). The truth is, Tokihiro Naito’s Hydlide slaps.
Once in the kingdom of Fairyland, three magic jewels were stolen away, unleashing a great demon, who also turned the princess into three fairies, who were imprisoned around the kingdom in various spots, and then monsters were set upon the land. It’s cool though because a young knight named Jim has got this. I’m not even joking. Dude’s name is Jim the Knight. Yeah, Hydlide whips.
Hydlide has the distinction of basically being the only game where a developer has gone on record saying The Black Onyx directly inspired him that I could find in weeks of pouring through ancient Google-translated JRPG forum posts, dodgy archives of old websites (Yuji Horii definitely liked it though), and even Szczepaniak’s The Untold History Of Japanese Game Developers.
The Black Onyx came out in January of 1984, The Tower of Druaga came out in June, and Hydlide came out that December. That is one hell of a development window, but it worked, and Hydlide would go on to be ported, expanded for the Famicom (and worldwide release), sequeled, and eventually made a laughing stock with the tremendously disparaged Virtual Hydlide (a secret Sega Saturn classic).
The Tower of Druaga (Namco, 1984)
It is impossible to overstate the importance of Masanobu Endo’s The Tower of Druaga. Fresh off creating the venerable vertical shooter Xevious, Endo had the idea to combine fantasy RPGs’ puzzles, dungeons, and itemization with the Epic of Gilgamesh, and build out what is likely the first role-playing game for an arcade using Namco’s Super Pac-Man hardware. Don’t believe the negative publicity, Druaga may be obtuse and difficult, it might not give up secrets readily, but that’s the fucking point. Go play a real ass game of Dungeons & Dragons and after a weekend spent falling down pits, being obliterated by trapped portals, or just getting perforated by skeletons with tridents and tell me this isn’t the real deal.
Druaga is as simple as it gets: Get the key, unlock the door. But what stands between Gil and successfully rescuing Ki is a maze filled with monsters, hidden items, special equipment, and a timer that will send out indestructible Will-o-Wisps that hunt Gil down. Also each floor is randomized, there are no clues about making hidden items appear, and missing them will stop you dead in your tracks. But hey, at least there aren’t any cursed items, like in Sega’s Fatal Labyrinth.
With a legacy of being too obtuse and difficult for gamers and critics outside of Japan, this beloved and enduring title helped kick Japan’s RPG, and especially Action RPG, industries into overdrive. Without it we don’t get Zelda or Ys, we don’t get Yoshio Kiya’s 20 some odd Dragon Slayer games, or the practically uncountable number of Dragon Slayer off-shoots (like Trails or Xanadu). We definitely don’t get Dark Souls, and the entire JRPG world would look very different. So show a little respect the next time Tower of Druaga comes up. Damn.
Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu (Nihon Falcom, 1985)
I could have put just 1984’s Dragon Slayer here, but I’d lose the opportunity to write “in Dragon Slayer II did Falcom a side-scrolling action RPG decree (I’m not apologizing).” And also, this way I get to mention one of the biggest RPG franchises of all time, and gesture at the ways it grew like a weird JRPG rhizome.
Story wise, Xanadu is standard fare: Big fuck off kingdom needs a big fuck off hero to find a big fuck off sword from the big fuck off dungeon to kill the big fuck off dragon. Unsurprisingly this is basically the story for the first Dragon Slayer game.
However, by switching the original format on its side for platforming and exploration (combat is still a top-down bumping affair like Dragon Slayer) and juicing the hell out of the role-playing systems (with full-fledged character statistics, magic systems, vendor NPCs, and a real inventory with gear that changes the protagonist’s look), Xanadu gives the Dragon Slayer uber-franchise its first big branch. Riffing on the the alignment system from Wizardry, Xanadu introduces Karma where the morality of enemies must be considered when killing them—kill too many good ones and temples won’t touch you and you won’t be able to level up until you drink a special poison item that has to be found in dungeons and carries with it a powerful debilitation—and given that each area only has a set number of enemies to kill for XP, and that weapon skill and magic ability both level up independently based on use, Xanadu quickly becomes one hell of an adventure in character management. And that’s before we even get to food being a resource, or equipment levels.
If you ever feel overwhelmed by modern day ARPG systems, Xanadu is a major point of origin for all your frustrations. It rules.
The Portopia Serial Murder Case (Chunsoft, 1983-1985)
Years before there was an Overture from Dragon Quest to play at the Tokyo Winter Olympics, Yuji Horii was already tinkering with verb-based menu inputs and thinking about how he can shoehorn a dungeon into an adventure game, how conversations with NPCs worked, and the importance of riddles and open-ended exploration.
1983’s The Portopia Serial Murder Case is an adventure game in the mode of the classics of the Apple II era. A picture of a room is displayed, and players engage with it using a strict verb-object text parser. Portopia was much more complex than many early adventure games with its focus on NPCs in the form of branching dialogues and even interrogations. By 1983 when Portopia was released, the connection between text and graphic adventure games was starting to percolate together with the germinal RPGs of the time. But in 1985, when given an opportunity to port Portopia to the Famicom, Horii took this to the next step. Horii strips out the text parser for a verb menu and lets players “mouse” over the image and select hotspots using the controller’s d-pad. Conversations are also reduced to a menu interface. And then, finally, having become RPG-pilled, Horii includes a first person dungeon crawl out of nowhere, simply because he played Wizardry and he can. Everything learned here would be deployed fully in the creation of Dragon Quest, which just might be one of if not literally the greatest RPGs of all-time. Every RPG fan should play Portopia. Seriously.
Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.