In 1982-1983, one Koichi Nakamura joined a contest being held by a once-business real-estate company now gone Video Game publisher, known then as Enix (now called Square-Enix) along side another designer and content creator for a Japanese magazine known as Shonen Jump - Yuji Horii. Yuji provided Love Match Tennis, and Koichi Nakamura, the head of Chunsoft (who programmed all those O.G. 8-bit Dragon QUest/Dragon Warrior games), entered THIS - Door Door. Which was originally developed for the NES PC-8801 (ah, another thing I like, old NEC products!). It won "Runner Up" in aforementioned contest. He won 500,000 Yen as a part of the Outstanding Program Award prize.

In Door Door, you play as "Chun" - a nickname given to Nakamura (as well as the first part of the namesake of his company Chunsoft) - who is tasked with the job of surviving various maze-like situations and trapping various aliens behind doors scattered throughout the maze - hence the name "Door Door".

I think I first encountered this on that Contra whatever-in-1 cart ROM I keep bringing up on these pages. It was one of the later games before it degenerated into a listing of quick-entries into later levels of other games on the ROM and I remembered enjoying it a lot. I had ZERO clue that this had anything to do with Dragon Quest or it's developers, I just kinda' liked it as a time waster, short spurt game, and moved on when I lost that ROM a million years ago.

Then I get the Sup-400-in-1 on my 39th birthday and find this on there again, and then after my initial quips about it being some strange game about a penguin tricking animals to get behind doors.....oh what a Surprise I was in for. At the same time, I was really digging into Dragon Quest's history - big time - having now amassed the whole big 4 8-bit localized Dragon Warrior Variants, and bingo bango, here I am hearing "And Koichi Nakamura entered his game "Door Door"" - "Door Door" I thought, that sounds familiar....and then realized I'd played it.