TITLE
Why Dragon Quest Failed to Make it In America 30 Years Ago
AUTHOR
Nadia Oxford
PUBLICATION
USgamer
YEAR
2019
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
Dragon Quest is 33 years old. Like the mythical creatures it takes its name from, the role-playing game series has become bigger and wiser in its passing years. It’s grown from a simple adventure where a legendary hero slowly trades blows with monsters to an epic that travels through an enchanted world for dozens of hours.But it takes effort for a fantasy protagonist to build themselves up from a stick-swinging slime-slayer to a grown warrior who’s fully outfitted to fight scourges that slither up from the deepest pits. Dragon Quest had a slow start in Japan, but it picked up tremendous steam after its publisher, Enix, promoted the game in Japan’s widely distributed Shonen Jump magazine. When Nintendo of America prepared to release the localized version of the game—exactly 30 years ago this month—it immediately ran large-scale promotions in hopes of getting North Americans to fall in love with RPGs as hard as Japan.
Despite Nintendo’s efforts, Dragon Quest—which became Dragon Warrior in the West because D&D publisher TSR held the rights to the Dragon Quest name at the time—hardly caught fire in North America. Though a handful of kids certainly fell in love (the author of this piece included), Dragon Warrior generally sank to the bottom of NES owners’ libraries and was buried under the deluge of Super Mario, Mega Man, and Castlevania games available at the time. Nintendo tried its best to make us love Dragon Warrior, and it failed. This is where Homer Simpson might suggest the solution is to “never try,” but Dragon Quest has fortunately found itself a dedicated Western audience since its Shockmaster-style 1989 debut.
Looking back on Nintendo’s push, it’s not hard to understand why all those Dragon Warrior cartridges wound up languishing in living rooms. Cultural differences between Japanese and North American audiences contributed to the disinterest, but time was simply not on Nintendo’s side, either. By the time Dragon Warrior came Westward, Japan was already enjoying its enormously improved third installment, Dragon Quest 3. Novel as it was, Dragon Warrior was already arcane and dusty by the time it arrived, and Western audiences just couldn’t get excited when much flashier games like Super Mario Bros. 3 were on the horizon.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Enix
Nintendo
GAMES MENTIONED
Dragon Quest
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Yuji Horii
Jeremy Parish
David Sheff