Some Gaming History

I’ve known for a while about The Portopia Serial Murder Case, the first game that paved the way to Visual Novels, but I didn't know until today that it was created by the same brilliant game designer and the same programmer who went on later to create the first console JRPG together, Dragon Quest (released in the USA as Dragon Warrior) — Yuji Horii (also of Chrono Trigger fame) and Koichi Nakamura. The Dragon Quest series have long been some of my favorite games, and to know that the same duo was responsible for inventing Visual Novels (especially in the Detective genre) as well as Dragon Quest is really mind blowing to me. Some of my greatest inspiration. And, both of them are still active in the game industry to this day, with Yuji Horii (age 71 as I write this) still designing entries in the Dragon Quest franchise.

To celebrate this discovery, I went back and began playing Portopia seriously for the first time today, and was amused to find that a certain point in the game involved an underground maze, which looks remarkably like a retro-style maze demo I made a few years back.

There isn’t much online about the maze in Portopia, so I took it upon myself to map the entire thing out. Here it is:

You start at the stairs (marked UP), and have to find your way to the safe, retrieve the evidence, and return to the stairs. The Monster is a bit of an easter-egg, paying homage to Wizardry, the computer game from Horii found inspiration for this pseudo-3D dungeon navigation style.

None of this, of course, has all that much to do with the Ghostwood Game Engine project, but I think it’s fascinating that they were bouncing between genres as radically different as those which I envision Ghostwood supporting.

Well, that’s it for now! I’ll have another update about game engine progress coming along soon.