This is one of the most infamous computer games from Japan ever made. You can mostly blame the 1967 film The Graduate. I’ll explain along the way–
From the first issue of Genma Taisen, the original manga.
Genma Taisen, the manga, was first serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine starting in 1967, with writing by Kazumasa Hirai and art by Shotaro Ishinomori. By then both men had established careers, with Hirai writing the 8 Man series (1963 – 1966) and Ishinomori launching Cyborg 009 in 1964; both are early important works of the Japanese superhero genre, and Ishinomori would not only later be called “the Stan Lee of Japan” but would be honored with an entire museum dedicated to his work.
Genma Taisen opens with Princess Luna (an actual princess from Transylvania who can see the future) in an airplane that gets smashed from space.
This is the first volley in a war waged by the demon Genma who seeks to destroy the Earth, as he has done on many worlds before. Luna and the alien cyborg Vega (whose own world was destroyed) gather together a team of psychics (starting with the main series protagonist Jo Azuma) in order to stop Genma.
They fail; or at least, the last issue ends mid-story on an ambiguity (that might imply Genma wins). There’s theories about either interpersonal conflict or conflict with the publisher.
The Eye of Genma, watching from the sky.
The concept was still popular, so there were later spin-offs: another manga series, a novel, and an eventual TV series, all that take different story routes.
One series is post-apocalyptic (after Genma wins) where Princess Luna is still alive and able to use time travel to try to foil Armageddon (but Jo doesn’t exist, which means it’s really a different timeline than the original?); another alternate timeline has Jo discover his psychic abilities and the coming of Genma on his own. The more recent (2002) TV show also involves a time portal after the apocalypse but without Princess Luna involved. There’s a whole chart on Japanese Wikipedia dedicated to the multiple family structures depending on which version of the plot is happening.
The movie Genma Taisen: Harmagedon came out in 1983, and it bases its plot more on earlier books of the original story timeline, but this time ending with Genma’s defeat.
Early in the movie, from the English subtitled version released in the 90s.
The movie was made at the instigation of the publishing/movie mogul Haruki Kadokawa. When Kadokawa took over the book-publishing company Kadokawa Shoten from his father in 1975 he said to the board (allegedly) “I am the Godfather” and had ambitions to expand into multiple medias from what was previously a print-only business. The essential idea was to take books and have movies that would go with them, which could then synergize into merchandising and music. He explained in a later interview the idea for this came from the movie The Graduate (1967) and how the movie caused the book and soundtrack to both be best-sellers.
From a Genma Taisen pamphlet.
For Genma Taisen, Kadokawa was a fan of the director Rintaro (being hot off the success of the movie Galaxy Express 999) and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse; from an interview:
One day, the president of the company Kadokawa, Haruki Kadokawa, who was considered the enfant terrible of the publishing world, wrote me some kind of a love letter telling me that he wanted to meet me. I came to see him, and he made me an offer to make something very different from what I had previously done, for example, at Toei.
I was excited to be able to make new things with that project, and I thought I could go to the top of my ambitions regarding creative freedom. I accepted his proposition with great pleasure. Haruki Kadokawa was an extraordinary man, and he told me I had total freedom for this movie and that he would never intervene in the content. He gave me 250 million yen to use freely for that film. It made me want to run away with the money [laughs]. It was just our first meeting,
The movie was released simultaneously in March 1983 with a computer game. An arcade game was announced at the same time and released a few months later; it was on laserdisc (one of the earliest such games, it came out before Dragon’s Lair) using clips from the film.
Sierra tried to hit similar synergy with The Dark Crystal but their deadline slipped; here, 7 different computer versions came out produced in a matter of 2 months, all by the same programmer: Yoshinobu Takahashi.
Our author, shown with “3 million yen” worth of computer equipment. Technopolis December 1983, with an interview that I’m pulling the biographical details from.
Yoshinobu Takahashi’s interest in electronics started in junior high school when he joined his school’s amateur radio club; he got a license in high school and chatted with a friend over radio while studying for exams. He hadn’t gotten interested in computers yet, but there wasn’t really an opportunity until the TK-80 kit came out. He had a friend that used an expanded version (COMPO-BS/80) in order to play Space Invaders. This was the first time he realized the world of computers and the world of games combined.
From NEC Retro. The original TK-80 was a loose-motherboard kit (like the KIM-1); the COMPO-BS/80 made it more of a regular computer.
After leaving high school he went to the Chiyoda Institute of Technology and Art to study computers, starting with hardware. Not long after he got a Sharp MZ, learning BASIC by typing in programs from magazines. His first game project was a (physical) slot machine; he soon found himself liking software more than hardware, although he didn’t start writing computer games until after graduating.
The standard Japanese route is to then take employment exams to get into companies (like his fellow graduates did, jobs were easy to get); the only exam he took was for ASCII Magazine to be an editor (he was rejected). What he really was aiming for was to be an independent programmer. He knew there were programming “stars” from the US (like Nasir) so he figured the same thing would happen in Japan, even if it hadn’t happened yet.
He took up part-time work with a company that managed inventory control terminals for supermarkets (and would go to supermarkets to fix their hardware personally); while doing this, he aimed to go professional and started making games on a PC-6001. He started with a version of Star Trek and sent it to Image Soft, and they agreed to publish it in July, only a few months after he graduated.
From AucFan.
This gave him enough motivation to start programming full-time, and develop his first serious original game, スパイ大作戦 (Mission: Impossible). This is the official title given both in the game itself and on the packaging; it nearly always gets translated as “Spy Daisakusen” (Spy Mission) but since スパイ大作戦 is the name of the actual show (you can see it in the video below from The Dubbing Database), I think Mission: Impossible would be the more appropriate translation?
He described it as a “Role-Playing Adventure Game” but it isn’t really in a modern sense an RPG or an Adventure game; it’s more of a strategy game. You pick supplies to start and then infiltrate an enemy headquarters, while moving around in a 3d view while stealing classified documents. Aspects like the player’s starting stats are randomized.
From the scan by Hubz.
He got the concept from watching the TV show. I studied the documentation and didn’t see any mention of official licensing. The reason the publisher may have gone through the effort is we aren’t talking about Image Soft any more; but Ponyca (or Pony Canyon). Their official company history traces all the way back to 1955 with the establishment of the Nippon Broadcasting System, which later launched a music tape business in 1966 and Canyon Records in 1970. Like Xtal Soft they made the natural transition in 1982 from putting music on tapes to putting software on tapes. They also started with anime video in the late 70s and ended up having licensing agreements with big companies; in short, they’re more likely to both have the ability and desire to do things through official channels.
It did sell well; Takahashi cites it as being the first hit for the distributor Ponyca, selling over 10,000 copies when accounting for all the different versions (PC-8001, PC-8801, MZ-1200, MZ-2000, MZ-600; all the ports except PC-8801 were his).
Official tie-in or not, the game associated him with tie-in games, and this is how he got to working on Genma Taisen which was official. Unlike Dark Crystal (where Roberta Williams explicitly talks about the game working without having seen the movie first) this game is deeply integrated; it literally doesn’t make sense without the extra plot context, starting with a scene a fair ways in the movie.
7F000001 from Twitter.
I have the PC-8001 version of the game and the PC-98 version of the game; the PC-8001 version is text only! For the most part I’ll be showing off the PC-98 version (people generally played the game with graphics). However, let me start with PC-8001, which manages some impressive starting screens anyway:
Notice the mention of Haruki Kadokawa (the publishing/film mogul) as a producer.
The last screen there is where the weirdness starts. The PC-98 version to compare:
The layout pretends this is like an RPG, although it really isn’t. The characters in the upper left are Jo Azuma, Luna, and Vega. The scene starts here at Jo’s girlfriend; it seems to be about 23 minutes in the movie. And somehow Luna helps with the situation? Everything is baffling enough I’m going to separate out the gameplay in part 2, so stay tuned, and find out if this really does deserve legendary kusoge status.
(Also, thanks to f_t_b and gschmidl for file assistance.)
Renga in Blue 
