The Christmas video game release schedule is hotting up, but as we prepare for another slew of unseasonally violent shooting games and the controversy that inevitably accompanies them, one quaint little title is, quietly, doing very well indeed.

In just over three weeks on sale, Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box has sold nearly 500,000 copies in Europe, leaving it riding high in the charts, giving such blockbusters as FIFA 10 a run for their money.

And what’s the secret of this extraordinary success? A well-mannered middle-aged professor in a top hat, who travels the world solving riddles.

The latest game is the sequel to last year’s Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which introduced us to the professor and his young apprentice, Luke. With very little publicity or fanfare, it sold nearly 1 million copies in the UK, and went on to be garlanded with awards, including a prestigious BAFTA for game of the year. At the time of writing it is still in the top 20 bestsellers, after 60 weeks.

But who is this mysterious professor, and where exactly did he spring from?

My investigations lead me not to Tokyo or Kyoto, the traditional hotbeds of Japanese games, but to Japan's southern island of Kyushu, and Hakata, a lively coastal town pinned to the shore by verdant, mist-covered mountains.

This is the unlikely home of Level 5, the developer responsible for the Layton games. The games have been good to the company, which has grown in its 11 years from a small publisher of role-playing games to occupy three floors of a large office building in downtown Hakata.

The work space looks like any other office, with employees hunched over computer terminals in silence. It could be the headquarters of an accountancy firm, were it not for the dedicated games-playing space, or the amphitheatre-like conference room, replete with brightly coloured cushions and a giant plasma screen.

Closer inspection of the computers reveals that most of the people on the floor are artists and animators. As they draw on a computer tablet with a motion-sensitive pen, the cast of characters from the latest Layton game comes to life. For such high-tech work, it's reassuringly old-fashioned, essentially a digital version of pen and ink. By the side of one animator sit two DVDs that have provided visual inspiration for the latest Layton game; Jeunet and Caro's The City of Lost Children and Murnau's Faust.

At the centre of this activity is Level 5's founder, CEO, and the originator of the Professor Layton series, 41-year-old Akihiro Hino.

We talk seated either side of a table flanked by life-size figures of Darth Vader and Yoda from the Star Wars films. Video games may be big business, but, it seems, its best exponents are those who can hang on to their inner child.

Professor Layton springs directly from Hino's childhood fascination with Mental Gymnastics, a best-selling series of puzzles written by a university professor, Akira Tago. “As a young man, I really enjoyed Tago's puzzles,” he says. “So I first went to him with the idea of telling a story peppered with tricks, and I asked him if he would create them. What he suggested to me that we should make a game of the Mental Gymnastics series that I had loved so much as a kid. Eventually, this evolved into me writing a storyline that we then filled with puzzles from Mental Gymnastics.”

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