Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell is one of the most iconic manga and anime franchises of all time, and has spawned movies, animated seasons, merchandise and – of course – video games.
The first game to be based on the media franchise was released on PS1 in 1997. Developed by Exact, the team behind the Jumping Flash series, the game is notable for having Shirow on board as the creator of the storyline as well as the art.
Speaking in an interview translated by Shmuplations that originally appeared in the Japanese PlayStation Magazine in 1997, producer Tetsuji Yamamoto revealed that it was Shirow himself who instigated the project, as he was a big fan of Exact's work on the Jumping Flash titles:
The idea for this game came from Shirow himself. He was a big fan of the Jumping Flash series we created, and he brought the plans for a Ghost in the Shell game directly to SCE. At the time, I just so happened to be working on Jumping Flash. Exact was making Jumping Flash 2, and they had other game plans in the works, but everyone at Exact is a big fan of Shirow, so when he brought those plans everyone dropped what they were doing and switched over to it. If Shirow hadn't brought the plans himself the way he did, though, I doubt we would have made this game.
When the game was released, many magazines made the comparison between it and Jumping Flash, and Yamamoto joked that the working title was "Shooting Flash", admitting that it was "basically Jumping Flash's gameplay with Shirow's characters."