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East and West, Warrior and Quest: A Dragon Quest Retrospective
An anniversary look back at the most influential console RPG ever made.
25 years ago, Dragon Quest invented the console RPG. Not that most of us knew what an RPG was back in 1986.
Even three years later, when Dragon Quest finally reached the U.S., I only knew the term RPG as an acronym for "rocket-propelled grenade." Growing up reading G.I. Joe comics had made me moderately fascinated with military terminology; author Larry Hama parlayed his personal experience serving in Vietnam into a war comic that, while not exactly realistic, definitely had a ring of martial authenticity about it. The other (and, these days, far better-known) meaning of RPG -- role-playing game -- was completely foreign to me. My family didn't have a computer, so I was never exposed to the likes of Ultima or The Bard's Tale until years later. As for pen-and-paper RPGs, those were out, too: Dungeons & Dragons was persona non grata in my conservative home town. We even had an overzealous police detective who actively crusaded against D&D, calling it the devil's work and hosting mandatory school assemblies at which he would lecture students about how playing D&D would make us commit suicide and dabble in the Satanic arts.
Reese Witherspoon Jordana Brewster Laetitia Casta Claudette Ortiz Julia Stiles
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