Game news 40 years ago, this game revolutionized video games and everyone forgot it. It’s time to pay homage to the ancestor of Final Fantasy

Game news 40 years ago, this game revolutionized video games and everyone forgot about it. It’s time to pay homage to the ancestor of Final Fantasy

A Dutch fan of Dungeons and Dragons travels to Japan

On January 31, Final Fantasy VII celebrates its 27th anniversary. An anecdotal anniversary which will probably just highlight the impatience of players at the idea of ​​playing Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth: it must be said that the title was voted the most anticipated game of the year at the 2023 Game Awards. Final Fantasy saga, and more generally Japanese role-playing games (JRPG), could have taken a very different direction. In fact, it was the impetus of Western role-playing games that shaped the genre. Three titles in particular are worth remembering, even if this article will only cover one.

We must then take an interest in the career of Henk Rogers. After his Dutch-Indonesian parents divorced, he followed his mother to New York with her new husband. In the United States, the young man decided to study computer science at the University of Hawaii. He has little interest in his studies but meets a group of friends with whom he will spend long evenings playing… Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing game where each player plays the character they want in a fantasy universe. In an interview with Time Extensionhe tells :

We had our own rules in Hawaii. We played constantly, using photocopies of the original three Dungeons and Dragons books. There was a part in the center of campus that almost never ended. People came in and out of the adventure during classes (…) It was an important part of my life.

When deciding for his future, he prioritized love over studies and computers by deciding to go to Japan to follow a woman there. Luckily, his family also settled there, which allowed him to work in the precious stone trade with his father.. He doesn’t get along with him but learns a lot from this professional relationship. He says in hawaiibusiness :

He didn’t even do basic things like pay taxes or keep an inventory. …I learned to be a good salesman from him. But I also learned not to do certain things like him. For example, I have always kept my business in a streamlined structure, with people in place who know everything about the business. So if I go away, the company is still there when I come back. This is something he has never been able to do. As soon as he left, his business collapsed, because it was all in his head.

Six years of work which allow him to have money aside. However, during this time, a lack is felt: that of Dungeons and Dragons. He then inquired about the cultural place of this type of game and noticed that there was a gap:

There was a void compared to Dungeons and Dragons. I later found out that there were a handful of players in Japan, but there was no community and certainly no cultural familiarity with the “create a character” language..

An absence of RPGs in Japan

However, Japan is no stranger to computer role-playing games. At the beginning of the 1980s, the archipelago also saw the arrival of consumer personal computers, notably the NEC PC8001 (the equivalent of the Commodore PET in the West). In its video on the birth of JRPGs, the YouTube channel Game Maker’s Toolkit says that the “cool kids” of the time played imported games on consoles imported from the West. For example, it became common knowledge that Satoru Iwata (the former president of Nintendo) was a Wizardry and Ultima player on Commodore PET.

Quickly therefore, Henk Rogers notices that there is no local RPG, strictly speaking.

I immediately understood that the main difference between the two markets was that there were no computer role-playing games in Japan. The US had Ultima and Wizardry. But there were no such adventures in Japan. I said to myself: I could do it.

Except that if having the idea is already a step forward, you still need to have the means to realize it. This game was his first product and, as if that wasn’t enough, he had an ambitious vision: he really wanted to make a video game adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons into a video game. But he had to deal with the (very) limited memory of computers of the time. In the end, the game only includes one class (compared to four at the start) and the inventory. However, we can already see the beginnings of future JRPGs: character progression by level, turn-based combat and dozens and dozens of lines of text to read.

Development begins and proves tedious. Henk Rogers doesn’t read Japanese and has to rely on his wife (remember the one he followed to the archipelago? Well that’s exactly what you think)… who she is not computer expert.

“I asked each editor to give me their name”

The game is finally ready… But it still has to be sold. He then contacted publishers and Softbank, the popular one in Japan, decided to buy 3,000 copies from him… before reversing course and only buying 600. The first months of marketing in 1984 were therefore complicated.. During the first month of launch, he said he only received one phone call. Rogers is not discouraged and decides to make some adjustments. This is still not enough since only four copies are sold. Still convinced of the potential of his game, the Dutchman took the problem head on and went door to door:

I asked each editor to give me their name. I typed it in and asked them to choose the head that looked most like them. I taught them how to create a D&D character. Then I let them play.”

Obviously, we wouldn’t be talking to you about Black Onyx if such a strategy had fallen through. Henk Rogers did well to have persevered since he explains that he sold 10,000 copies of his title each month that followed. Today, sales are estimated at 150,000 units distributed: a colossal figure for the time, especially since the title was intended exclusively for owners of personal computers! For the little anecdote, Rogers also adds a little anecdote linked to the title of the game;

The first hundred people on each gaming platform received a real black onyx gem if they made it to the end of the game with a perfect karma score (achieved by not fighting anyone weaker than your party). If they succeeded in this feat, they could send the passphrase “Iggdrasil”, and I would send them a gem and a certificate attesting to their success.

The gem in question, an onyx, is said to have the reputation of purify karmic energies. Also a great way to draw on the experience of your previous work.

The Black Onyx: an ancestor and influencer

Released in 1984 in Japan, The Black Onyx is therefore technically the first JRPG to see the light of day on the archipelago and to display certain commercial success. We don’t have to wait long before seeing local studios branch out into the subject with titles that are much more optimized and much more sold than that of Henk Rogers. In fact, from 1986, it was the Dragon Quest series which was developed by Enix on PC-98, MX but also Famicom (the name of the NES in Japan). Yuuji Horii, director, explains that he was inspired by Ultima and Wizardry. In turn, the father of Final Fantasy Hironobu Sakaguchi explains that he was inspired by Dragon Quest or even Shigeru Miyamoto’s Zelda (EDGE Magazine, n°314). However, in an interview with Nintendo developers from 2003, it was Link and Zelda’s dad who explained that he was influenced by Ultima and… The Black Onyx.

When Zelda was created, I was influenced by games like The Black Onyx and Ultima. The ideal would have been not to be influenced at all but I wanted to take the interesting parts of these games.

Henk Rogers can therefore boast, today, of having created in Japan the first game of a genre that is still popular today. Likewise, he can show on his CV that he served as an influence to Shigeru Miyamoto at the same time as the creation of Zelda. As if that weren’t enough, Henk Rogers is also the person to whom we owe one of the biggest video game hits of all time and if his name rings a bell, that’s completely normal: it’s is himself who was commissioned by Nintendo to recover the rights to Tetris from the Soviet government. Although he didn’t get along with his father-in-law, he definitely resumed his business as a precious stone dealer with flying colors.