Sentences written about this title, gathered by type from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles (as of 2026-8-30).
A Family Computer (hereafter Famicom or FC) port was released on 1985-11-29, becoming the first adventure game on the FC.
Games at the time of release were mostly in genres with stories removed from reality, such as science fiction and fantasy, and although it was not the first of them, games set in contemporary Japan like this one were in the minority.
In 1985/11, Enix — until then a PC game publisher — entered the market and succeeded with Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken, the first adventure game on the Family Computer.
It was first released on the NEC PC-6001 and has since been ported to other personal computers, the Family Computer (Famicom), mobile phone services, and most recently, Windows as Square Enix demonstrates their natural language processing technology.
The game was conceived by Yuji Horii around 1981, when he was 27 years old, shortly after he bought his first computer and learned to program with it by modifying other games.
A Famicom port was then released in 1985 and was the first adventure game to be released on that platform.
According to Square Enix, it was "the first real detective adventure" game.
When information on a remake of Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin: Ohotsuku ni Kiyu was announced in 2024, Horii commented on his own X account, "The culprit is not Yasu, you know".
According to Square Enix, it was "the first real detective adventure" game.
The English-language webzine Retrogaming Times Monthly compared the game to the later-released Shadowgate where the player must examine and collect objects and find their true purpose later on, and recommended Portopia to fans of "slower paced games that require [players] to think through puzzles".
According to Official Xbox Magazine, Portopias features, such as point-and-click, murder mystery plot, open world, suspect interrogations, nonlinear gameplay, dialogue choices, and alternate endings, are "standard for 2015, but way ahead of its time in 1983", comparing it to L.A.
In the game industry at the time of the announcement, development by individuals was the norm and work was hardly divided up at all, and on the original PC-6001 version of this game as well, Horii handled all of the work - programming, scenario, graphics, and so on - as 1 person on his own.
It sold 600,000 copies (also given as 800,000). Because entering commands with a keyboard as on the personal computer versions is difficult with a Famicom controller, a command-selection interface like that of the personal computer version of Ohotsuku ni Kiyu was adopted, and there was no longer any need to type instructions one character at a time.
The Famicom version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case sold 700,000 copies.
The game was never released in the Western world, largely due to its mature content, involving themes such as murder, suicide, fraud, bankruptcy, interrogation beatings, drug dealings, and a strip club.
John Szczepaniak praised its pacing and quality of writing, and considers the gameplay and plot to be sophisticated for its time.
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