Dragon Quest Day Date in the current year: May 27, 2025

Dragon Quest (released as Dragon Warrior in North America prior to 2005 to avoid a trademark conflict) is a series of role-playing video games credited with having had a significant impact on the development of the genre. As of 2025, it consisted of eleven main installments and numerous spin-off games and other media (manga, anime, and light novels) published under the franchise.

Dragon Quest was created by Yuji Horii, who began his career in the video game industry as a freelance journalist and switched to video game design after winning a game programming contest sponsored by the video game publisher Enix. He was inspired by American role-playing games such as Wizardry and Ultima, as well as his own adventure game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case.

At the time, RPGs were a mostly Western PC genre. Horii wanted to introduce the genre to the Japanese console market by creating an introductory game that would appeal to a wide audience with its simple interface and engaging storytelling. To create Dragon Quest, he teamed up with programmer Koichi Nakamura, character designer Akira Toriyama (of Dragon Ball fame), and composer Koichi Sugiyama.

The first game in what would become the Dragon Quest series was released in 1986. It featured a young hero tasked with defeating the creature known as the Dragonlord and recovering the stolen Balls of Light. It featured an open world where the hero could defeat enemies to gain experience and interact with townspeople to gather information, shop, and recover.

Initial sales of the game were low, but Horii wrote several articles for Weekly Shōnen Jump that helped boost Dragon Quest’s popularity. The game received positive reviews, sold one million copies within the first six months of release, and won several industry awards.

Since then, ten more installments in the main series have been released to critical acclaim. Toriyama and Sugiyama collaborated with Horii on all of them. Sadly, Sugiyama passed away in 2021 and Toriyama in 2024, so Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate, announced in 2021, will be the first installment of the main series to be released after their deaths.

Dragon Quest has been credited with introducing new features to the role-playing video game genre, as well as having a significant impact on its development thanks to its emphasis on intuitive gameplay, making it easier for new players to get started and enjoy the games. Even the most recent installments have maintained this approach, which many critics find nostalgic and refreshing (though some have criticized the gameplay for being too simplistic).

Dragon Quest Day is celebrated on May 27 to commemorate the release of the first installment in the Dragon Quest series. On the occasion of the holiday, game developers usually share news about the series (updates on existing titles and new announcements).