Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii releases a free mystery game made with Claude in "about 30 minutes"
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Yuji Horii, the mind behind Dragon Quest, has put on X a link to an interrogation adventure he claims to have assembled in about 30 minutes using Claude. Komiya, the suspect, is a retired locksmith aged 72 who has to be caught out in his contradictions by means of the evidence. Horii contrasts it with Portopia, the 1983 adventure in which the script, the drawings and the code were all down to him.
The creator of Dragon Quest has made a game with AI and says it took him "about 30 minutes".
On Sunday, October 11, Yuji Horii posted on X "Komiya in the Interrogation Room", a free mystery game that opens in the browser and is distributed through a Claude Artifact link, the way of sharing things made with Claude, the assistant from Anthropic.
The player is a police officer questioning Komiya, a 72-year-old former locksmith suspected of breaking into a pawnshop safe. Komiya lies, so each session is about setting his contradictions against the evidence until his version falls apart. The character has two gauges, one for agitation and one for resistance: when the second hits 100 he invokes his right to stay silent and the questioning gets stuck. The final rating depends on how many lies are uncovered.
In his message, written in Japanese, Horii recalls making "The Portopia Serial Murder Case" on his own, on PC: the story, the graphics and the code. Today, he says, telling an AI what to do is enough for one person to turn out a "fairly decent" game.
According to Inven Global, Enix published that game in 1983 and it is regarded as an early milestone of Japanese adventure games. It is not its first brush with AI: in April 2023 Square Enix put out "SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: THE PORTOPIA SERIAL MURDER CASE", a free Steam title that relied on natural language processing to interpret what the player typed; according to the outlet, a lack of polish and restrictions adopted on ethical grounds kept it from living up to expectations. A new version of the original is also in the works, with Horii as general director and an expanded story, planned for PC (Steam), Switch and Switch 2 in 2027.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
Coming from someone who built a pioneering Japanese adventure game by hand, this carries more weight than any lab demo: the barrier to making a small game is no longer knowing how to draw or code, but having a clear idea and knowing how to explain it to the machine. That opens the door to teachers, trainers or small businesses that want a simple game to teach or promote something, and that can share it with a plain link, with no store and nothing to install. There is a nuance that should not be lost: Horii himself describes the result as decent, nothing more, and behind that half hour lie decades of craft designing mysteries. The tool shortens the execution; the judgment about what makes an interrogation interesting still belongs to whoever commissions it.
Source: Inven Global · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
