Dragon Quest (ドラゴンクエスト)

Dragon Quest was born in 1986 from the meeting of three authors: Yuji Horii on story, Akira Toriyama — the artist behind Dragon Ball — on character design, and Koichi Sugiyama, a classical composer, on music. The trio made legible to a mass audience a genre then reserved for computer players.

In the West the series is a curiosity; in Japan it is a national event. The launch of the third instalment in 1988, on a school day, caused so much truancy and so many thefts in the queues that a practice took hold: release subsequent entries on a Saturday or a public holiday. The legend of a law requiring it is false, but the custom was real.