Some notes:

• Please do not take this as a strict history of events. I have been thorough in my research, and in broad strokes I am confident this story runs close to reality. But for the details of each scene, please consider this one possible version of events, an artistic recreation. Also, I only have access to sources in English and machine translations of Japanese sources, and no history is perfect.
• Some parts of this story seem commonly accepted, but I decided to omit. I don’t deny that they could have happened, only that I have had to use my best judgement. For instance, it seems to be commonly accepted that Nakamura and Horii travelled to the US after the Enix contest to visit Applefest 1983, which is where they discovered Wizardy. The closest thing I can find to a source for this is The Road To Dragon Quest manga, so it’s perfectly likely to be an embellishment. I can’t find this trip confirmed by any interview with Horii or Nakamura, even when they are talking about Wizardry or the Apple II computer. So I ditched it, and took the same attitude with the rest of the story, also.

Anyway, I hope you learned something about this fascinating period of game development. This almost broke me on an organisational level. So many sources! I’ve probably lost as much as I’ve learned.

Still, I’m intending to write at least a few more of these “origins”/”histories”. The bit at the end with Sakaguchi was a tease. This could be the start of a very long saga.