The Last Story--Its performance and its future

[yinkadare]

jacks81x said:

I was only 10 at the time, so maybe my memory is a little hazy, but I don't remember Nintendo doing that much to promote FF1 in Japan (I don't know about in America).  Afterall, the game was a new IP from an unkown company that was going bankrupt.  Not exactly something to invest hefty marketing costs into.  Also, I watched quite a bit of TV at that age, and I can't remember seeing one commercial on FF1.  Also, it only sold 400K copies because that's all that was made.  They were initially only going to ship 200K copies, but Sakaguchi convinced them to double that.

 

http://www.develop-online.net/news/28960/Sakaguchi-discusses-the-development-of-Final-Fantasy

You remembered right.  The first FF game was hardly promoted at all.  In fact, there was very little hype surrounding its release and most people thought that it would be a commercial failure because it looked like a poor DQ clone and it seemed like a last ditch effort from a down and out company trying to make some cash before it goes under.  So the general public didn't really take the game seriously until after its release when people actually played the game and word of mouth started going around that the game was actually pretty good.