Meta:Yuji Horii

Yuji Horii 堀井 雄二
Yuji Horii (left), next to Masahiro Sakurai (right), during an interview held in 2019.
Information
Date of Birth	January 6, 1954
Place of Birth	Awaji Island, Japan
Works	Designer, writer
Social media
YouTube	None
Twitter	@YujiHorii
Bluesky	None

Yuji Horii (Japanese: 堀井 雄二), born January 6, 1954, is a Japanese video game designer and scenario writer best known as the creator of the Dragon Quest series of role-playing games, supervising and writing the scenario for Chrono Trigger, as well as the first visual novel adventure game Portopia Serial Murder Case.

Career

Horii graduated from Waseda University's Department of Literature. He also worked as a freelance writer for newspapers, comics, and magazines, including the Famicom Shinken video games column that ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1985 to 1988. He then entered in an Enix-sponsored game programming contest, where he placed with Love Match Tennis, a tennis video game, motivating him to become a video game designer. Horii then created The Portopia Serial Murder Case along with Chunsoft, a game that later inspired Hideo Kojima, of Metal Gear fame, to enter the video game industry. It is the first part of the Yuji Horii Mysteries trilogy, along with its successors Okhotsk ni Kiyu: Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin (1984), and Karuizawa Yūkai Annai (1985).

After creating several more visual novel adventure games, Horii went on to create Dragon Quest, which is said to have created the blueprint for Japanese console role-playing games, taking inspiration from Portopia, as well as Wizardry and Ultima. He was a fan of Apple PC role-playing games and was motivated to create Dragon Quest for ordinary gamers, who found such games difficult, and thus he worked on an intuitive control system, influenced by his work on Portopia. His works also include the Itadaki Street series. Horii was also a supervisor of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game, Chrono Trigger, which had multiple game endings, with Horii appearing in one of the endings with the game development staff.

Horii currently heads his own production company, Armor Project, a company that has an exclusive production contract with Square Enix, a contract established with Enix before the company merged with Square. He is on the selection committee for the annual Super Dash Novel Rookie of the Year Award.

Works

In the Mystery Dungeon franchise, he appeared only for the Dragon Quest Mystery Dungeon series. Of this, he was an executive producer for one game.

Year	Game	Role	Ref.
1993	Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon	Original Scenario and Game Design
1999	World of Dragon Warrior: Torneko: The Last Hope	Original Scenario
2001	Dragon Quest Characters: Torneko's Great Adventure 2 Advance: Mystery Dungeon	Original Scenario
2004	Dragon Quest Characters: Torneko's Great Adventure 3 Advance: Mystery Dungeon	Executive Producer

References

• Wikipedia