Retarded Weeb
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
That's not exactly true over in Japan either. Red/Green didn't immediately sell amazing there since it was a new series that was released without that much fanfare, but while it didn't sell particularly high in the first month, it had unusually strong legs and kept selling well month after month. It hit a cool 1 million copies sold in September, which was still 7 months before the anime's debut. Things were also helped by stories of Mew being hidden in the game code and being found via bugs being spread by Coro Coro magazine in April. When Pokemon Blue was sold in October via a special distribution where you had to order through Coro Coro magazine, they got more than double the expected orders, leaving the magazine's publisher Shogakukan swamped with order forms they were struggling to process and getting claims from people about not getting the game they ordered. Used copies of Pokemon Blue were getting sold on the second-hand market at the time for as much as $100.
All of that was before the anime was released in April 1997, and it only started pre-production in August 1996. It certainly helped blow the franchise up to even further heights, but it was already building up momentum fast even before it came out. In fact there was some argument at the time over whether to make it, since one side thought it would capitalize on the game's success at a good time to blow it up further, while another side was worried it could kill the momentum they already had if it was bad or if people thought Pokemon as a whole was over once it ended.
