Dragon Quest co-creator Yuji Horii made an AI-generated game in 30 minutes

Yuji Horii, the 72-year-old co-creator of Dragon Quest, has released a small text-based interrogation game built almost entirely through generative AI — and says the whole thing took about 30 minutes to make. He shared it on X over the weekend alongside a note warning players not to press the boost button.

In his post, Horii drew a direct line between his past and present. Back in 1983 he built The Portopia Serial Murder Case almost entirely solo — writing the story, drawing the art, and doing the programming himself. Now, he says, AI lets him skip the parts he can't do and just give instructions to get a playable result. "It's truly astonishing," he wrote. His enthusiasm for the tech isn't new: earlier this year Dragon Quest 10 integrated Google's Gemini AI to power an NPC chatbot called Chatty Slimey, designed to give players a conversational partner inside the MMO. Horii defended that move in a Famitsu interview, saying AI "hardly ever makes things up anymore" and that it lowers the barrier to interacting with the technology.

Horii is currently attached to two major projects — Dragon Quest 12: Beyond Dreams and a long-awaited sequel to The Portopia Serial Murder Case, decades after the original. His open embrace of generative AI sits against a backdrop of serious industry tension: voice actors, developers, and players have all raised concerns about AI's impact on jobs, and tools like the recently announced Google and Unity collaboration have drawn criticism for making AI-assisted game creation even more accessible and potentially threatening to working developers.

Horii's 30-minute experiment is unlikely to settle any of those debates, but it does put one of gaming's most respected veterans firmly in the pro-AI camp at a moment when the industry is still figuring out where the lines are.