Yuji Horii is 71 years old, and the iconic Japanese game developer has not stopped working on his masterpiece creation: Dragon Quest. While the game director isn’t only known for the JRPG series, it’s been his baby since 1986, and he isn’t planning on stopping anytime soon.
With Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined in the works, a huge project to make the PS1 RPG more playable to modern audiences, and the twelfth mainline game deep in development, alongside other remakes, Horii is making more DQ games than ever before.
In an interview with Game Informer magazine, Horii explained that, while others are more involved in making the games than he is, the series’ creator wants to oversee every project in the series until he physically can’t any more.
“You know, in recent years, there’s been increasingly more areas where I rely on other members to work on parts of the Dragon Quest titles,” the developer said, “but I would still like to keep myself involved to oversee everything. I do consider Dragon Quest to be my child. I just really love it, and in that sense, I do think I will work on it until I die.”
Horii explained that his “next goal” is simply “to witness the 50th anniversary” of the Dragon Quest series in 2036, which will occur when the developer is 82 years old. By then, even more remakes of classic DQ games should be released, as well as DQ XII, and we may even have another new mainline entry to look forward to.
At the time of writing, quite a few members of the original Dragon Quest team have passed away in recent years. Legendary, but problematic, composer Koichi Sugiyama, passed away in 2021, and the series’ iconic artist Akira Toriyama—who also worked on Dragon Ball, Chrono Trigger and so much more—passed in March 2024 of an acute subdural haematoma.
Nevertheless, even in his 70s, Yuji Horii appears healthy and as busy as ever, if not busier than ever, and he’s not the only iconic game developer planning on working until the reaper comes. Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima recently revealed in a discussion with VGC that he’s left his colleagues a “USB stick of game ideas” to continue working on after his death. Now, that’s pretty cool.
