Jake Hunter, known in Japan as , is a mystery adventure game series originally developed and published by Data East in 1987. The property would later transfer to WorkJam, and then to Arc System Works.
Despite its popularity in Japan, the first of its games to receive an English language release was Tantei Jingūji Saburō DS: Inishie no Kioku, retitled and released in North America on June 11, 2008 by Aksys Games in truncated form as Jake Hunter: Detective Chronicles. The game was re-released on May 26, 2009 as Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past, containing the originally localised three cases with new translations, plus three further cases, and a large number of unlockables including comics. No further releases would be announced until July 1, 2017, when Aksys Games revealed they would be bringing over Tantei Jingūji Saburō: Ghost of the Dusk in 2018. A prequel game, given the branding Alternate Jake Hunter internationally, was localised internally and released in 2019 with original character names and settings preserved.
History
According to Enterbrain's Famitsu, the Tantei Jingūji Saburō franchise had sold over 2,220,000 units at the time of its twentieth anniversary, making it one of the longest running and best-selling Japanese adventure game series in history. There are nineteen main series entries, complemented by a 25-game mobile sub-series and various examples of tie-in media. A persistent series tradition has been to use titles from songs and albums as names for installments, with most frequent reference made to the works of Kenji Sawada.
Family Computer
The first game of the series, , was released in 1987 by Data East for the Family Computer Disk System. Following in the style of Yuji Horii's popular Famicom adventure games, the "command selection" style games featured advanced graphics, sound effects, and distinct hardboiled scenarios to set themselves apart from contemporaries. The series employed a number of advanced game mechanics, developing techniques which would later find popularity in the industry at large. Time played an important role in the first game, with each command selected by the player causing a certain amount of in-game time to elapse; failure to solve the mystery during the allotted time period resulting in a bad ending. This time system would later be revived in the series' 7th installment. The scenario for the series' 3rd and 4th installments was written by a fledgling Kazushige Nojima, who added segments following the secondary lead which alternated on a predetermined basis.
Fifth generation consoles
Production was halted after the 4th installment, but would be revived internally when Data East took on series fan Tatsuya Saito. Saito would become scenario writer for the 5th game in the series, directed by Eiichi Nishiyama, imminent heir to the role of series producer, and released on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn in 1996. This fifth entry would see several developments on the original games made possible by the use of the CD-ROM: an overhaul of the series' graphics and sound, including an opening movie featuring an animated prelude and voice acting for the first time; a "zapping" system which allowed different branches of the story to be played by way of alternating characters; 3D-rendered mini games; and the inaugural installment of a sub-series known in Japan as the Mystery Casebook games (Jake Hunter Unleashed in English releases), featuring super-deformed caricatures of the main trio encountering small-scale mysteries involving extra challenging gameplay, which would be included alongside mainline games.
Most of these features would become recurrent in the series, with the 6th installment, written by Hirotaka Inaba, replacing the previous game's stylised character design with a painted realist style produced by original character designer Katsuya Terada, and adding a new "password" mechanic, involving hidden codes in the main game which could be used to unlock bonus content. Bearing the newly christened series subtitle "Detective Adventure Game", both this game and the next, released exclusively for PlayStation, would feature opening movies directed by Shimako Satō.