The Japanese author Aya Nishitani has recently been sharing some amazing stories about the Megami Tensei series on Twitter/X, which includes the fascinating story behind why it received two drastically different versions for the Nintendo Famicom and Japanese home computers.
If you're familiar at all with Atlus's Megami Tensei games, you'll likely already know that the series originally evolved from a trilogy of books by Nishitani, which were released in Japan in the 1980s under the title Digital Devil Story. However, what you might not have realized — unless you've done a bit more digging into the history of the series — is that Atlus's Nintendo Famicom title wasn't actually the first game adapted from the novels to be released in Japanese stores, with the developer Nihon Telenet also creating its own game in 1987 for home computers (including the MSX and the PC-8801mkII SR), which was released a few months prior.
Both of these games were notably different from one another, with the more successful Famicom title being a dungeon crawler (similar to later titles in the series), while the original computer game was instead a top-down action role-playing game. This has caused some in the game's community to wonder in the past why this was the case.
Previously, the most commonly cited explanation for why the game differed so much comes from an interview with the former Nihon Telenet artist Kouji Yokata from the excellent The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers (by occasional Time Extension contributor John Szczepaniak). There Yokata states that the games had been specifically "designed to avoid the stereotypical genres of each system — action games on the home computer, roleplaying games on home computers". Yokata, however, mentions that he wasn't entirely sure whether "this was because of instructions from the original author" as he had just joined the company at the time.
This is where Nishitani comes in, with the author recently posting a new thread earlier today on Twitter/X, giving some more information on how two different adaptations ended up entering production.
In this thread, Nishitani stated that the Nihon Telenet game actually came about later than the Famicom title (despite being the first to come out) and that it was the result of Atlus turning down his pitch for a Dragon Quest-style adventure for the Nintendo console.
Nishitani explains:
"Before Mr. Ueda of Atlas said to me that Megami Tensei would be a dungeon game, I was thinking about the game on my own. I felt that if I made a field RPG for the NES of the time, it would resemble Dragon Quest."
"I came up with a game in which I set up a demon symbolizing each of the above ground, below ground, sky, underwater, and desert, and Akemi Nakajima, paired with messenger devils, would use the sword of Kagutsuchi to break through and rescue Yumiko. The messenger devils were not only Cerberus, but also Triton or Siren for the sea, and Garuda for the sky. Those drawings are no longer available, but the grimoire that came with the PC game and the character setting sect convey the atmosphere of the 1980s gaming world.
"Before I told about my plan, Mr. Ueda had decided that Megami Tensei would be a dungeon game, so I did not have a chance to talk about my idea. Then, by chance, the CEO and producer of a game company called Nippon Telenet saw my plan and said, 'Your setting is interesting. We'll think of a game for you,' and took my drawing to them. That is why, I believe, PC games were created, which are very different from Megami Tensei on the NES."
As mentioned, this isn't the only fascinating story Nishitani has shared about the game via his social media, with the author revealing back in April 2023 that Nintendo had initially wanted to adapt his books before deciding that "a demon-summoning game couldn't be released under the Nintendo brand". This eventually led to Nishitani making a partnership with Atlus and Nihon Telenet instead.