Japan's biggest RPG flopped so badly in America that Nintendo gave it away free — and accidentally built Nintendo Power
In Japan, Dragon Quest was not merely a successful game but a cultural event, with later entries prompting reports of children skipping school on release day. Its success rested heavily on two things that had nothing to do with the game's mechanics: character and monster artwork by Akira Toriyama, already a household name through Dragon Ball, and relentless promotion in the manga magazine Shōnen Jump, which gave it access to essentially every young reader in the country. It arrived pre-sold to an audience that already loved its art and trusted its pedigree.
None of that existed in North America. Toriyama was largely unknown, Shōnen Jump had no American equivalent, and the console RPG as a genre had no meaningful audience. Nintendo published the game itself in 1989 as Dragon Warrior — the Dragon Quest name being unavailable in the United States for trademark reasons — and it invested seriously in the release, enhancing the graphics over the Japanese original, writing a genuinely good localisation with a distinctive faux-archaic voice, adding a battery save in place of the original's password system, and bundling a strategy guide with every copy.
It was a resounding flop. The cartridges sat in warehouses, unsold and apparently unsellable.
Faced with an inventory it could not shift, Nintendo did something extraordinary: it gave the game away. Toward the end of 1990, the company offered a free copy of Dragon Warrior to anyone who took out a $20 subscription to Nintendo Power. The promotion was a way of converting dead stock into something useful, and it worked far better than anyone expected.
Nintendo Power gained nearly 500,000 new subscribers on the back of the offer. And since Nintendo Power was, as has been observed, essentially a hundred-page monthly advertisement for Nintendo products, the company had just placed that advertisement into half a million additional households — at the cost of cartridges it had already written off. The magazine's reach and influence in the early 1990s owes a great deal to a role-playing game nobody wanted to buy.
The consequences ran further than a subscription bump. Hundreds of thousands of American children who would never have chosen to buy a turn-based Japanese RPG suddenly owned one, free, in the post. Many of them played it — and a meaningful number discovered that they liked it. The giveaway seeded the genre in a market that had shown no appetite for it, and it is frequently credited with helping create the American audience that Final Fantasy and its successors would later find waiting.
Commercially, it also kept the series alive in the West: the promotion's eventual success allowed Enix to bring the next three Dragon Quest games to North America. The episode is one of the strangest in localisation history — a game so unwanted that giving it away for nothing turned out to be the most profitable thing anyone could have done with it, and in the process helped establish both a magazine and a genre.