Yuji Horii (堀井 雄二, Horii Yūji, born January 6, 1954) is a Japanese author, video game designer, writer and director best known as the creator of the Dragon Quest franchise,[1] supervising and writing the scenario for Chrono Trigger, and The Portopia Serial Murder Case, released in 1983 as one of the first visual novel adventure games.

He also worked as a freelance writer for newspapers, comics, and magazines, including the Famicom Shinken video games column that ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1985 to 1988.

[2][3] It is the first part of the Yuji Horii Mysteries trilogy, along with its successors The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance (1984) and Karuizawa Yūkai Annai (1985).

[1] He was a fan of Apple PC role-playing games and was motivated to create Dragon Quest for ordinary gamers, who found such games difficult, and thus he worked on an intuitive control system,[9] influenced by his work on Portopia.

Horii received an award at the 2009 Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association developers conference and a lifetime achievement award at the 2022 Game Developers Conference for his work on Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger.