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

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

A Dutch Dungeons and Dragons fan travels to Japan

On January 31st, Final Fantasy VII celebrates its 27th anniversary. An anecdotal anniversary that probably only illustrates the impatience of gamers 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 Game Awards 2023. Final Fantasy Saga, and Japanese role-playing games (JRPG) in general, could have taken a completely different direction. In fact, it was the impulses of Western role-playing games that shaped the genre. Three titles are particularly worth mentioning, although only one is discussed in this article.

Then we have to be interested 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 USA, 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 in which each player plays the character they want to be in a fantasy universe. In an interview with Time extensionhe says :

We had our own rules in Hawaii. We played constantly and used photocopies of the original three Dungeons and Dragons books. There was a part in the middle of campus that almost never ended. During the lessons, people continued to have adventures. (…) It was an important part of my life.

When he decided on his future, he prioritized love over studies and computers and decided to go to Japan to pursue a woman there. Fortunately, his family also settled there, which enabled him to work with his father in the gem trade.. He doesn’t get along with him, but learns a lot from this professional relationship. He says clean hawaiibusiness :

He didn’t even do basic things like paying taxes or keeping inventory. …I learned from him how to be a good salesman. But I also learned not to do certain things like him. For example, I have always kept my company in a lean structure, with people on site who know everything about the company. So if I go away, the company will still be there when I come back. He has never succeeded in doing that. As soon as he left, his business collapsed because it was all in his head.

Six years of work that allows him to have money aside. However, one shortage is felt during this time: that of Dungeons and Dragons. He then inquired about the cultural significance of this type of game and discovered that there was a gap:

There was a gap 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 language of “creating a character.”.

There are no RPGs in Japan

However, computer role-playing games are no stranger to Japan. The early 1980s also saw the arrival of private personal computers in the archipelago, notably the NEC PC8001 (the equivalent of the Commodore PET in the West). In its video on the birth of JRPGs, 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 widely known that Satoru Iwata (the former president of Nintendo) was a Wizardry and Ultima player on the Commodore PET.

Henk Rogers therefore quickly realizes that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a local role-playing game.

It was immediately clear to me 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 told myself: I could do it.

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

Development begins and proves to be lengthy. Henk Rogers can’t speak Japanese and relies on his wife (remember the woman he followed to the archipelago? Well, that’s exactly what you’re thinking)…who isn’t a computer expert.

“I asked every editor to tell me their name”

The game is finally finished… But it still needs to be sold. He then contacted the publisher and Softbank, the popular publisher in Japan, decided to buy 3,000 copies from him… before changing course and only buying 600. The first months of marketing in 1984 were therefore complicated.. He said he received only one call in the first month of launch. Not discouraged, Rogers decides to make some adjustments. However, this is still not enough as only four copies are sold. Still confident in the potential of his game, the Dutchman tackled the problem head on and went door to door:

I asked each editor to tell 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.

Of course, we wouldn’t be talking to you about Black Onyx if such a strategy had failed. Henk Rogers did well to persevere, as he explains that he was selling 10,000 copies of his title every month. Today sales are estimated at 150,000 units sold: 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 tied to the game’s title;

The first hundred players 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 certifying their success.

The gemstone in question, an onyx, is said to have the reputation cleanse karmic energies. Also a great opportunity to draw on the experiences of your previous work.

The Black Onyx: an ancestor and influencer

The Black Onyx was released in Japan in 1984, making it technically the first JRPG to see the light of day in the archipelago and achieve some degree of commercial success. We don’t have to wait long before we see local studios tackle titles that are much more optimized and sell much more than Henk Rogers’s. In fact, starting in 1986, it was the Dragon Quest series that 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. The father of Final Fantasy Hironobu Sakaguchi, in turn, explains that he was inspired by Dragon Quest or Shigeru Miyamoto’s Zelda (EDGE Magazine, No. 314). However, in a 2003 interview with Nintendo developers, Link and Zelda’s father 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 to not be influenced at all, but I wanted to get the interesting parts of these games.

Henk Rogers can therefore now boast of having created the first game in Japan in a genre that is still popular today. He can also show in his CV that he had an influence on 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, it’s completely normal: he himself was commissioned by Nintendo to recover the rights to Tetris from the Soviet government. Even though he didn’t get along with his father-in-law, he resumed his business as a gem dealer with flying colors.