Dragon Ball

Dragon Ball by the Aprompt crew is one of the great curiosities of retro gaming: a fighting game based on Akira Toriyama's famous manga, created in 1993 by a group of Indonesian high-schoolers from Surabaya led by Agustinus Nalwan. It is today widely considered the first video game ever made in Indonesia — and the first Dragon Ball fangame on PC.

In play it is a simple one-on-one fighter against the computer: you need two winning rounds to advance, and if time runs out before a knockout, the fighter with more energy left takes the round. Nalwan and his friends wrote it in Turbo Pascal with assembly routines, squeezing everything into a mere 64 KB of memory — limitations that give the game its unmistakable homemade charm.

The game premiered on 29 July 1993 at a school fair and then spread through the BBS scene, floppy by floppy. In Indonesia it now enjoys the status of a founding monument: a reminder of an era when the country had no games industry at all and everything depended on a few teenagers coding after class. Years later its story was retold by PC Gamer.

A nice footnote: in 1996 Nalwan published the book Pemrograman Animasi dan Game Profesional, in which Dragon Ball served as a working example of game programming. You can play this piece of gaming history right in your browser on OldGame.cz.