Drinks

The three of them looked at one another and smiled.

Business was business.

Sega got the meat, and third parties like them, who had seen the situation clearly in advance, had finally managed to keep the soup in their own bowls.

As for those peers still struggling bitterly in the December meat grinder, they could only blame their own noses for not being sharp enough.

Just a few days before the Toy Story game became a massive hit, on November 18, another animated film carrying sky-high expectations quietly opened in Japan's domestic theaters.

Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell.

This work, which had stunned the world at E3 with just a few minutes of trailer footage, met with a solid cold shoulder when it truly faced Japan's mass market.

Shochiku Films could not be said to have slacked off on publicity, even bundling in the trailer for Sega's Jupiter game.

But the audiences who bought tickets and entered the theaters were not buying it.

Cyberpunk, cyberization, philosophical contemplation of soul and shell—these concepts, ahead of their time, had too high a threshold for ordinary Japanese audiences in 1995.

In the theaters, quite a few people watched until they grew drowsy, and after the screenings ended, complaints poured out one after another, with people bluntly calling it obscure and hard to understand.

When the box-office data was fed back to the production side, it was so bleak that Shochiku Films' executives could only shake their heads.

Only in professional animation circles and among a tiny number of core sci-fi fans was this film raised onto the altar.

Its animation quality, storyboard design, and Kenji Kawai's score were all top-tier in the industry.

Acclaimed but not a draw—that became the truest portrayal of Ghost in the Shell.

Sega Headquarters, Managing Director's Office.