Lupin III video games

The first Lupin III game arrived while Part II was still on television: Taito’s arcade Lupin III (April 1980), a stealth game about hauling bags of cash past the law, among the earliest stealth games ever made. Epoch followed with a Super Cassette Vision platformer in 1984, and Namco’s Famicom game Pandora no Isan (November 6, 1987) even brought Clarisse back from Cagliostro. The tie-in logic ran both ways: two Toho adventure games adapted the films for Japanese home computers, Cagliostro in 1987 and Legend of the Gold of Babylon in 1988.

The modern peak is the PlayStation 2. Bandai’s Treasure of the Sorcerer King (Japan 2002; North America February 10, 2004) is a full stealth production with a Yuji Ohno score and the whole gang playable, and Banpresto’s odd, beloved Lupin Is Dead, Zenigata Is in Love followed in Japan in 2007. Around the consoles, Heiwa’s pachinko and pachislot machines have carried Lupin in Japanese parlors since 1998, arguably the franchise’s biggest gaming footprint of all.