In the summer of 1995 Nintendo Power reported a Super Famicom game that was selling out in Japanese shops and had no story of its own to tell. RPG Tsukuru: Super Dante came with a short sample adventure, Fate, which took about ten hours to finish, and then handed the player the tools: choose an overworld map, place the towns, design the characters, set their energy bars and decide how hard the game should be. “The menus look like they’re from any RPG,” the magazine noted, “but in this one, players call the shots.”
That is the idea behind the whole series. RPG Maker, RPG Tsukūru in Japan (tsukuru means “to make”), turns the parts of a Japanese role-playing game into things to fill in: tile maps, a database of heroes, monsters, items and spells, a ready-made turn-based battle system, and “events” that decide what happens when the player talks to someone or steps on a square. A complete game can be built without writing a line of program code.
Fast facts
- Publisher: ASCII Corporation, then its successor Enterbrain; the current versions are made by Gotcha Gotcha Games.
- First release: RPG Tsukūru Dante 98, for NEC’s PC-9801, December 1992; ASCII had published RPG construction software since 1988.
- Consoles: Super Famicom, PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and later machines.
- Windows: RPG Tsukūru 95, 2000 and 2003, then XP, VX, VX Ace, MV and MZ.
- Scripting: Ruby, through RGSS, from RPG Maker XP; JavaScript plugins in MV and MZ.
- Games made with it: Corpse Party (1996), Yume Nikki (2004), To the Moon (2011).
On Japanese computers
The series grew out of ASCII’s construction kits for Japanese home computers. Wireframe, writing about the series in 2019, dates it from its “debut as Mamirin on the PC-88 computer in 1988”. The first program sold under the RPG Tsukūru name, according to the series’ history as summarised on Wikipedia, was RPG Tsukūru Dante 98, released for NEC’s PC-9801 on 17 December 1992.
On consoles
The console versions brought the idea to people without a computer. Super Dante on the Super Famicom was, Nintendo Power reported in 1995, “an 8-meg, battery-backed RPG that lets players design their own games”, and it had been on sale in Japan for about six months. American readers of the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine put the PlayStation version fourth on their list of Japanese games they wanted brought over in January 1999, behind Dragon Quest VII, Final Fantasy VIII and Ehrgeiz. When ASCII’s Fighter Maker came out in America that spring, the magazine thought its “sister title, RPG Maker” might follow if Fighter Maker sold well. It did follow: Agetec published it in America in 2000. Previewing it in June 2000, Edge thought that although players could not build a game “to quite the level of sophistication found in Final Fantasy VIII, RPG Maker may inspire the next generation of Miyamotos to a small degree”, and noted that finished games could be swapped on a memory card with friends who owned the program.
A joypad was a slow way to write a script. Reviewing RPG Maker 3 for the PlayStation 2 in December 2005, Hardcore Gamer found that entering “the amount of text you’ll need with the PS2 controller gets old fast”, that saved games took a lot of memory card space, and that the built-in art meant “your game will always look fairly generic”.
On Windows
The Windows versions are the ones most people outside Japan used. RPG Tsukūru 95, 2000 and 2003 were sold only in Japan, and English-speaking users first met 2000 and 2003 through unofficial fan translations. The first official English release for the PC was RPG Maker XP in 2005, which added the Ruby Game Scripting System. Enterbrain’s own description of RGSS was that it was “based on the Ruby language and customized especially for this program”, and that “by editing these RGSS scripts, you are free to change or add to any of RPG MAKER XP’s functions”.
Later versions moved to JavaScript and to an open market in plugins. Writing for Wireframe in 2019, Anna Blackwell recommended free plugins from the RPG Maker MV community, such as Yanfly’s and Victor Sant’s “Core” plugins, to replace the standard battle system or add name boxes to dialogue: “the lack of a name box in RPG Maker’s base software still boggles my mind.” RPG Maker MZ followed in 2020.
What people made with it
Some of the best-known games built in RPG Maker are not role-playing games in any ordinary sense:
- Corpse Party began in 1996 as a PC-9801 horror game by Makoto Kedōin, made with RPG Tsukūru Dante 98. Team GrisGris later remade it; Edge reviewed the English PSP release in 2012, finding its “unremitting bleakness” startling, though “Corpse Party’s RPG trappings are merely cosmetic”.
- Yume Nikki (2004), by the pseudonymous Kikiyama, was made in RPG Maker 2003 and has neither a conventional plot nor a battle system.
- To the Moon (2011), by Kan Gao of Freebird Games, was built in RPG Maker XP. Wireframe called it “a staunchly indie title” that “weaves a beautifully depicted tale of love and loss”.
For many later developers RPG Maker was simply where they started. Wireframe’s interviews with independent developers keep returning to it: the maker of Save me Mr Tako! had “dabbled in RPG Maker as a child”, and another developer, coming back to an unfinished project after national service, “opened RPG Maker, and couldn’t remember anything; not even my own code”.
Sources
- Nintendo Power issue 74, July 1995, pp. 57–58: RPG Tsukuru: Super Dante (“originally a PC game”, the 8-meg battery-backed cartridge, Fate, selling out).
- Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine vol. 2 no. 4, January 1999: Readers’ Import Request list. Vol. 2 no. 7, April 1999: Fighter Maker and its “sister title, RPG Maker”.
- Edge issue 85, June 2000: RPG Maker (PlayStation) preview.
- Hardcore Gamer vol. 1 issue 6, December 2005, p. 66: RPG Maker 3 review.
- Edge issue 237, February 2012, p. 130: Corpse Party (PSP) review.
- Wireframe issue 16, June 2019, p. 38: Anna Blackwell, “Standing out with RPG Maker plugins” (Mamirin on the PC-88 in 1988; MV plugins). Issue 2, November 2018: Save me Mr Tako!. Issue 31, January 2020: Glitchfall. Issue 58, December 2021: Kan Gao and To the Moon.
- Enterbrain, RPG Maker XP product page, rpgmakerweb.com (web): RGSS. https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/products/rpg-maker-xp
- Gotcha Gotcha Games, RPG Maker MZ product page and company page, rpgmakerweb.com (web): MZ’s release in summer 2020; Gotcha Gotcha Games as maker of the series. https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/products/rpg-maker-mz
- Wikipedia, “RPG Maker” (web, secondary): RPG Tsukūru Dante 98 and its date, citing Enterbrain’s history; the Windows versions; fan translations; Agetec’s American PlayStation release in 2000; RPG Maker XP as the first official English PC release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG_Maker
- Wikipedia, “Corpse Party”, “Yume Nikki” and “To the Moon (video game)” (web, secondary): the engines and creators of each game.