Henk Rogers arrived in Japan in 1976, young, jobless and hot on the tail of a girl. Within eight years he’d have written, designed and coded his first videogame, sold Japan a genre that would go on to dominate its videogame industry creating billions of dollars of worldwide revenue, and, naturally, made the girl his wife. In 12 years, he would discover a game called Tetris at a Las Vegas game show, and would travel to Russia with Nintendo to secure the exclusive rights to market it on consoles. For a man whose only experience of coding was working on mainframe computers as a student and whose only brush with gaming was in pencil-and-paper roleplaying, starting out was no mean feat.

“I was an avid gamer as a student at the University of Hawaii in the 1970s,” he explains. “I’d joke that my minor was in Dungeons & Dragons. We had a gamer’s club called ARRGH (Alternative Recreational Realities Group of Hawaii) where we’d play with our own unique rule-set, and I think it was here that I caught the game design bug. Personal computer software publishing became a viable business in Japan in 1982. I noticed shops selling computer games on cassette tape popping up here and there, so I decided I wanted to make a game, went down to Akihabara and scoured the shops to try to work out what might be involved.”

Rogers eventually settled on the NEC-8801 for his development platform, a PC set-up that cost him $10,000. With the hardware in place it was time to decide what kind of game he wanted to create.

“I made a conscious decision to develop a game type that existed in the US but not Japan. There were no RPGs – computer or paper – to speak of in the country at the time, so I decided to take a chance and do one. I didn’t speak or read Japanese back then, so it was a total reverse engineer of titles I had enjoyed back home.”

The game was designed, drawn, and coded by Rogers alone over an intense nine-month period in 1983. Rogers struggled to squeeze his vision into the 64K his machine afforded him, a constraint that meant only 20 percent of his original ideas made it into the final production. Originally designed to offer three job classes to players, in the end the game had to be stripped back to just one: warriors. Sequel The Fire Crystal offered players the chance to play as mages, while the third game in the trilogy, the unreleased Moonstone, was created for monks.

“I divided the development job between the only languages available for the machine: BASIC and assembler,” he explains. “The game had two main technical elements: movement and everything else. Movement was a fake 3D like Wizardry written in Z80 assembler while the graphic editor, map editor and everything else was coded in BASIC.

“The 20K of graphics space was split evenly between monsters and humans, opting for variation instead of animation: 30 monsters, 28 human bodies and 50 human heads. I also built a name generator, which gave each character you meet in the game a name in addition to their individual appearance. The plan was that your character was going to be your avatar and you could move it from game to game, friends’ games and sequels, on a cassette tape. It was all quite innovative stuff."

But getting the game into Japanese hands was far from simple. “Halfway through development I pitched Black Onyx to a publishing company and made a verbal agreement with the president for a distribution deal,” explains Rogers. “We agreed to split the profit after subtracting marketing and manufacturing costs. After three months of work I could see the light at the end of the development tunnel and told them I wanted to formalize the agreement. But the paperwork they tried to get me to sign bore no resemblance to the original verbal agreement. I pulled out of the deal, leaving me without a publisher.

“In desperation my wife called Softbank, a PC game distributor, to ask them for an introduction to a reliable publisher. After they had heard my pitch they advised us to self-publish, saying that they would place a large initial order to help out once the game was finished. In their words, all I had to do was ‘get my wife to answer the phone’. Obviously publishing is not that simple, but we naively did it anyway, borrowing $50,000 from a friend to set up Bullet-Proof Software. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

However, immediately after release Black Onyx was to hit some more near-fatal problems: “The game was finished just in time for Christmas 1983, but Softbank reneged on their promise to initially order 3,000 pieces and ordered 600 pieces instead. My rudimentary advertising campaign resulted in zero phone calls in the first month and four in the second after we had added some screenshots to the ads. The word had not got out; nobody knew what an RPG was and we were on the brink of collapse.”

Not one to give up easily, Rogers decided to go straight to the press. “I rolled up my sleeves and started knocking on doors,” he explains. “I visited every computer game magazine in Japan, sat the editor down and created his character. I had a set of questions I’d ask them in Japanese: ‘What’s your name? Which one of these 50 heads looks the most like you? Please pick out some clothes to wear’. Then I’d tell them: ‘This is you. Now we are going to go on an adventure’. I would play with their character for an hour while they looked over my shoulder. That way they’d see how to map with graph paper and pencil, how to explore the world, and buy and equip amour and weapons.”

This hands-on approach to PR paid off spectacularly. In the April editions of every Japanese gaming magazine Black Onyx had secured rave reviews. By May Bullet-Proof Software was selling 10,000 copies a month at ¥7,800 (£36/$72) a unit – the most expensive game on the market at the time.

Voted game of the year by the readers of Login magazine (the best-selling Japanese gaming magazine at that time), Black Onyx sold around 150,000 copies, not counting huge numbers of rentals. The game’s gigantic success paved the way for the other Japanese developers to bring their own RPG titles to market. The first Dragon Quest team went on the record praising Black Onyx as the influence for them investigating other western titles in the genre (specifically Wizardry). And so the RPG hacked and slashed its way into the Japanese videogame industry and consciousness.

Rogers is philosophical about the adaptation of his ideas into rival titles at the time: “I saw so many elements of Black Onyx replicated in subsequent RPGs and even titles across other genres, but what can you do? For example, I ditched the numbers that indicated player health for blue bar-graphs that turned red as the player got damaged. This system is widely used not only in RPGs but in fighting games such as Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter today.”

As well as introducing the RPG genre to Japan, Rogers’ game was responsible for launching some heavyweight videogame careers. Hisashi Suzuki, a Keio University student and part-timer at Bullet-Proof Software, wrote the manual. Suzuki would later go on to become president of Square Enix. “I meet a lot of people in the industry in Japan. Some don’t know the history,” says Rogers. “When I mention I used to have a publishing company in Japan, Bullet-Proof Software, they ask if I had anything to do with Black Onyx. I say I designed and developed it and a lot of the time they’ll exclaim: ‘Oh my god, you’re the reason I’m in this industry!’”

Bullet-Proof Software immediately went into production of a sequel but, by the third game, Rogers felt like he was being left behind by the bandwagon he had set in motion:

“The game made such a huge impact and caused so many clones to be developed I fast realized we just could not keep up. Dragon Quest was a game built specifically for the Famicom and Famicom players. The graphics and the story come from the manga world, which inevitably resonated with the Japanese psyche much louder than the Lord Of The Rings style I was familiar with. A westerner cannot compete with that kind of cultural incisiveness, so I started looking around the world for games to bring to Japan instead. I guess then, in some ways, the success of Black Onyx was not only responsible for Final Fantasy but also for Tetris.”