Buried on YouTube is a grainy video of a Japanese news broadcast. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, the footage is clear enough. It’s February 1988, and throngs of people are lining up for the new Famicom video game, Dragon Quest III. A man with a loudspeaker keeps one line orderly as it twines past trees and storefronts. Frantic shopgirls unbox dozens of copies. A nearby scramble crossing is jam-packed. It’s a video game launch so massive that it spawned a wild urban legend that used to pop up on old GameFAQs forums and schoolyards: The Japanese government had to step in and write a law mandating that future Dragon Quest games could only be released on the weekend to avoid civil disruption.
