For a huge number of American kids Dragon Warrior was the first RPG they ever played, and the reason is that Nintendo gave it away. The 1989 US release sold poorly, Enix and Nintendo were sitting on a warehouse of cartridges, and the fix was to mail one free to every Nintendo Power subscriber. Somewhere north of half a million copies went out in the post, which is how an entire genre got a foothold in a country that had shown no interest in it.

In Japan it's Dragon Quest, it came out in 1986, and it was a phenomenon on a scale that's hard to convey. Yuji Horii designed it, Akira Toriyama drew it, Koichi Sugiyama scored it, and it more or less invented the console RPG as a form: one hero, menu-driven battles, a town-and-dungeon loop, an overworld you gradually earn the ability to cross.

The American version was rebuilt rather than translated. Nintendo added battery saves in place of the Japanese password system, redrew the sprites so characters face the direction they walk, wrote the dialogue in mock-Elizabethan English, and paid for the whole thing themselves.

It's slow by modern standards. One hero, one enemy at a time, a lot of hours in the fields outside Tantegel Castle watching a Slime die. But the loop it taught is the loop everything since has used, and the specific feeling of finally being strong enough to walk somewhere that killed you an hour ago has never been improved on. There's a fine detail people miss too: the Dragonlord offers you half the world if you join him, and you can say yes, which ends the game right there.

It walked so Final Fantasy could run. A foundational cartridge, and a clever giveaway that paid off for decades.