Another Movie-Game Craze

Kalinske froze for a moment. "A hundred thousand units? That'll break the scarcity of our limited edition. If they pile up in inventory—"

"The Thanksgiving season, an epoch-making animated film, plus a solid tie-in game," Nakayama Takuya cut him off. "What could be more suitable as a holiday gift for the whole family than a video game and console of the same name? A hundred thousand units. Not one less. I'll coordinate with the production lines. The factory in Mexico will handle all limited-edition production for North America, and the assembly plants in China will fill the North American gap for the standard Jupiter units."

Facts proved that Nakayama Takuya's judgment was extremely precise.

The hundred thousand limited-edition units entered the North American market and sold out outright in the week of release. Restocking calls from major distributors blew up Kalinske's phone, only to be helplessly rejected by Sega's strict limited-edition policy.

This was not just a victory for the game, but a carnival for console sales.

Thanksgiving weekend passed.

The entertainment-page headlines of Hollywood's major newspapers came out.

From Wednesday to Sunday of its first week, Toy Story raked in forty-one million two hundred thousand dollars, directly breaking the Thanksgiving weekend box-office record.

It took in more than thirty million dollars over its first three-day weekend, becoming the second-highest opening of the year in the United States, behind only the summer release Batman Forever and its fifty-two million eight hundred thousand.

And behind this dazzling box-office report card was an equally astonishing game-sales report.

This collaboration between Sega and Hollywood pushed the effects of movie-game linkage to an unprecedented height.

Movie theaters became the best game demo shops, and the game in turn lifted the fever around the film's release.

The fact that its opening weekend was over a