Fresh off a string of modestly successful freelance games and ports for the likes of Dempa Shimbunsha and Bullet Proof Software, Kure Software Koubou founder/leader Eiji Kure decided to venture into the world of self-publishing with 1986's Argo, a "Three Dimension Adventure" that mixed turn-based first-person RPG combat and adventuring with the occasional dalliance into real-time third-person combat, expressed via clever mimicry of Space Harrier-esque sprite scaling; one might describe it as more tech demo than game (and it is scheduled for EGG Console release, so you'll be able to judge it for yourself in due time) but it made enough of an impact to allow Kure to go bigger and bolder with 1988's Silver Ghost, a real-time strategy-RPG that'd underpin the majority of their later works and influence a generation of Japanese developers.
Silver Ghost is built around real-time, large-scale overhead warfare using a game system dubbed "Gocha Chara", in reference to the pandemonium of dozens of units going at it: the player is able to recruit and/or assign a multitude of units to their army, who'll follow the player-controlled leader unit around the world map in designated formations and will automatically engage with any enemy forces they come across via bump combat. In addition to attacking based on formation, units will also take specific behaviour based on their class and other factors—archers will attempt to stay at an optimally safe distance while attacking, for example, and critically-injured units will attempt to retreat from the battlefield to heal—and you can manually control individual units if you want to get really specific; each unit is also named and can be leveled/kitted out individually, and there is a simple story with allied factions to win over and somewhat hidden boss fights and so on, so there's enough to let players build little narratives around their favourite units.
It's a little bit Ys, a little bit Bokusuka Wars and a little bit grand tactics, and while it's a mere prelude to where the system would go in future games, it strikes a remarkable balance between simulating the chaos of army-on-army skirmishes while still offering almost action game-esque controls that allow one to guide dozens of units with deceptively few commands; the Takahashi brothers have cited Silver Ghost as one of the biggest influences on their own Shining Force series, and they did attempt to make their own real-time Shining Force games at multiple points that I've always wondered about.... (I suspect the name of their studio, Camelot, was inspired by Silver Ghost's very Arthurian plot, too.)
Compared to most of his peers, who came straight out of college or even high school, Kure was comparatively geriatric when he began his game-making journey: he worked as a junior high science teacher and didn't learn to code until age 30, after being approached to write a short story column for the magazine Gekkan Micom by a former college mate, and through writing for the magazine, he picked up an interest in coding and quickly began to see it as a viable career path. Barring a hiatus in the '00s due to health issues, they've been actively programming and producing games and software as Kure Software Koubou since 1985, and proudly wield the self-proclaimed title of "the world's oldest active game programmer"—he's 72 years old, so if anyone wants to investigate just how true that might be, have at it.
If you want a taste of what he's been doing lately, his most recent game is a remake of First Queen, the first game in the series that took up the Gocha-Chara mantle after Silver Ghost, and it's very evident that dude did most of the work himself.