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PCGamer: The forgotten origins of JRPGs on the PC

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Some incline from PCGamer! Not really any new info if you read Hardcoregaming101, but good to see on a more major/mainstream site.

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-forgotten-origins-of-jrpgs-on-the-pc/

Long before Dragon Quest would ignite a golden age of Japanese roleplaying games, there was Seduction of the Condominium Wives. Forget genre tropes like heroic knights and evil dragons: this proto-JRPG was about a salesman going door-to-door trying to peddle condoms to lonely women while battling off Yakuza gang members and ghosts. Released in 1982, Seduction of the Condominium Wives was one of the first Japanese RPGs—if you can even call it that.

With Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Suikoden, it's easy to see why JRPGs and home consoles like the SNES seem inextricably linked. The truth is that a decade before these games rose to global prominence, Japanese developers had been designing RPGs on personal computers. Not all of them were hilariously sleazy eroge games like Seduction of the Condominium Wives, but they're crucial in understanding where the genre comes from and how its defining conventions, like an emphasis on character-driven storytelling, came to be. JRPGs might be remembered for their 16-bit golden age, but it's their forgotten genesis on the PC that paved the way.

The dark ages
The origins of Japanese RPGs is often attributed to Wizardry, a hugely successful western RPG designed by Robert Woodhead in 1981. There's no denying that Wizardy—and to a similar extent Richard Garriott's Ultima—had a huge impact on JRPGs. In the September/October issue of Computer Gaming World, columnist Roe R. Adams describes Woodhead's and Garriott's fame in the East: "Both Wizardry and Ultima have huge followings in Japan. The computer magazines cover [Richard Garriott] like our National Inquirer would cover a television star. When Robert Woodhead, of Wizardry fame, was recently in Japan he was practically mobbed by autograph seekers."

But the truth is that before either game was imported to Japan, a thriving development scene of proto-RPGs had already taken hold. In 1982, Japan's videogame industry was booming. Arcade games like Nintendo's Donkey Kong had come out a year earlier and sparked a golden era of videogame mania. While Japan was allegedly facing a shortage of 100 yen coins from the success of arcade games, its personal computing industry was also booming. Companies like Nippon Electric Company (NEC) were coming out with innovative hardware like the PC-8001, which is where the first Japanese RPGs would arrive.

It then goes on to cover a few of the early games, talk about the development of Black Onyx, and eventually the lead up to Dragon Quest. Anyway no new information for me, but maybe for some of you blokes there's something to glean and I'm glad to see it up on PCGamer.
 

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