and my friend nat is correct, i think it was i who had the number 3,000. i don't know where the number 5,000 came from but it was back in the early days of the list when lots of tti people were still within reach.
i also remember something weird about hu-card production. they had to be ordered/pressed in batches of 500 or something like that. sega had a similar rule with the dreamcast that gd-roms were only available in batches of 50. in any case, as they were more costly to produce than cds and obviously inferior, ordering too many of them was not warranted.
if you're wondering (as i often used to) why a game like magical chase didn't get a second print run, there are two reasons for that:
1. second print runs were rare in those days and for much of the 90s. it's why games like radiant silvergun and sapphire remain so hard to get. that they sold out only meant to the publishers that they had had their run in the market and if they had truly been in demand, they would have sold out immediately instead of just steadily. the first notable exception in north america i can think of was panzer dragon saga which had an initial run of 11,000 games and a later run of 4,000. japanese publishers were even stricter when it came to print runs and some of you may remember ncs' description of what they were like in their strictness. the biggest fear among publishers and retailers was overproduction and excess inventory. given tti's horrible budget, they must have been terrified of having yet more unsold hucards when there were still so many unsold even prior to the release of games like OotG. i'm willing to bet games like somer assault only got runs of 10,000 or 20,000 tops though i obviously can't prove it.
2. as i have already mentioned, the tg16 was all but gone. tti was even making exchange offers by offering some kind of credit ($50? per tg16 unit) for duo purchases. they were trying to re-equip the userbase. this left the express as the only other use for hu cards in north america. with super cds kicking in and taking over as the dominant format, the early death of the sgx, the 'underuse' of the arcade card [the poor thing but wonderful thing] in japan and lots more factors and NEC's opting against backward-compatibility on the FX (believing that most would-be FX owners already owned pc engines and b/c would only make the already expensve fx even more expensive), the hu card was rendered useless as a viable medium (though i fell they could have done much more with it e.g. street fighter ii at 20 megs and the ten no koe memory banks). the moulds for hu cards back in japan were destroyed in the mid-90s and that came from steve and a few others in the know at the time.
in any case, whether at 3 or 5 thousand copies (if those numbers are even correct), magical chase and order of the griffon never sold out. lots of turbo games wound up getting bargain prices. i was working at toys r us when i heard about the death of the duo and within days i had quite a few turbo games (including exile, exile 2, vasteel, cosmic fantasy 2) for $10 each.
not to put another question mark into the mix but it really is amazing thinking back to 94/95/96. magical chase, ys, godzilla, dungeon explorer ii and many other hard-to-find games were sold everywhere on the internet. ebay and generations of new gamers and international gamers/collectors have just increased and put more miles between copies of each to the point that you almost feel as though they were hardly produced at all. my personal suspicion is that magical chase in particular had to have had more than 3k copies. with like 600 toys r us stores alone carrying the line- as well as the sears caalogue and some radio shacks (both in the duo days) not to mention a few other toy stores and some kmarts (of which there were between 1500+ at the time, i have to believe that magical chase got a little more shelf presence. but, then again, there was alot of stuff that never got out of tti' s warehouse and wound up buried (sniffle). maybe that's just painful thinking though.
Topic: 2 questions about Magical Chase (Read 871 times)
