Yuji Horii on His Early Days in Game Development: “I Did Everything Myself”

Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, has been shaping games for more than four decades. Now 71, he remains intimately involved with the franchise he launched in 1986.

During Game Informer’s cover story trip to Tokyo to play Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, we spent roughly 90 minutes with Horii discussing how the craft of making games has evolved from the 1980s to 2025. You can read the full cover reveal for more background.

Horii emphasized that the industry’s structure and scale have transformed dramatically. “You know, the development landscape is just completely different compared to back then,” he told Game Informer. “On the original Dragon Quest, we had a team of less than 10 people, but now we have a team of 300 to 400 spending years and years making one game; not to mention the rising development cost, too. So it’s just completely different.”

He also recalled his hands-on early days: programming, producing some art, and handling many tasks himself. “I would just do everything by myself,” Horii said, remembering the projects that preceded the first Dragon Quest. “People would just do that, and that [game] actually got sold as a finished product back then – just one person working on a single game. That’s just not something that can happen today.”

While solo-developed games still emerge regularly and the indie scene has grown considerably, Horii seems to be contrasting those one-off efforts with large-scale, franchise-level productions. On the scale of a mainline Dragon Quest entry, creating something like Dragon Quest XI or the in-development Dragon Quest XII as a lone developer would be far more difficult now than it was in the 1980s.

Release information: Dragon Quest VII Reimagined launches on February 5 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

For more on the title and the issue, see this article breaking down the digital edition: The Dragon Quest VII Reimagined digital issue, and consult the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined cover reveal. Subscribe to Game Informer here to access the full cover story and our deep dive into the franchise: The history of Dragon Quest, as told by Yuji Horii.