Moving boxes around yesterday turned up more than a few PS1 games I hadn’t seen in awhile – my life is mostly comprised of boxes in case you’re curious, and every so often I turn them over instead of writing semi-cohesive paragraphs about how important videogames are. Along the way I found the original Ghost in the Shell, which often gets labeled as a mediocre licensed title by people who haven’t played it.
In actuality the game is several shades of meeting and beating expectations, tossing players into a nimble tank, your trusty Fuchikoma, and offering up animation work from Production I.G – essentially making the game a precursor to all the work done on the Stand Alone Complex series.
The game was made by Exact in Japan, an internal Sony Japan studio that became Sugar & Rockets (the studio that inspired this site’s name) for awhile before apparently vanishing – but I’ve pieced that last bit together mostly from sugar packets given the fleeting and scarce nature of information regarding internal Sony Japan.
Anyway, what’s particularly special about this copy I turned up is that it’s an import from Japan. Not surprisingly, I’m a bit obsessive about collecting import copies of games whenever possible, but PS1 titles are one of the sweetest in my opinion. So long story short, I’ve tossed together some pictures of what certainly isn’t the rarest, but does qualify as one of the most impressively packaged games I own, which you can catch after the break if you’re into that sort of thing.
