Horii: Attitudes to games have changed
Where once "people wanted to stone me".
Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii has said that one of the biggest changes he's noticed over his long career is the way mainstream media feels about videogames.
"I've noticed interviewers have become a lot friendlier," Horii, who has worked on Dragon Quest titles since the middle of the 1980s, told IGN.
"When I started people would come to interview me, and just knowing that I worked in videogames - it was like people wanted to stone me, it was that bad. People thought of videogames as kind of a bad thing in society."
Not that it got in Horii's way. As well as writing the scenarios and designing the majority of the Dragon Quest games, including the Sentinels of the Starry Skies, which picked up 9/10 in Eurogamer's review, Horii has also had time to oversee DS remakes and work as supervisor on seminal SNES RPG Chrono Trigger.
"Now people that come to interview me, they have grown up with videogames and they know what they are, they've experienced it," he continued.
"30 years ago, people who interviewed me had no idea what it was all about. That's made it a lot easier for me."