What made the Final Fantasy VII guide sell a million copies?

At the time, guides that were released alongside their games sold preorders in the tens of thousands, and the most successful titles topped out around 70,000 copies. Within weeks of the game's release, the FFVII guide had sold 150,000. Waybright's verdict on those first weeks: initial sales like that, for any book of any kind, are crazy, at New York Times bestseller level. The million was not a slow accumulation over decades of reprints. The book broke out immediately, in the game's own launch window.

The Indianapolis Monthly account gives a confluence of three causes. First, the game: a role playing game so vast that a player could finish it and still not do everything in it, and, in Waybright's words, completionists need to squeeze out every little thing. Second, the hardware: the PlayStation let programmers squeeze in more characters, more worlds, and more secrets than cartridge games had held. Third, the audience: by 1997 a generation of adults had grown up with games and wanted more than a dry manual; they wanted something to collect. Brady had already begun answering that want, fleshing its guides out with four color artwork and limited edition hardcovers, the models, the magazine notes, for today's books.

GameSpot's 1997 comparison praised the Brady book's size and its Square artwork, then warned that it contained story spoilers, up to a major story element a reader could stumble onto by flipping to the wrong page, and recommended the two unauthorized rivals instead. The official guide still outsold everything. The lesson the industry took was about scale and timing, not review scores: the book that ships with a phenomenon, in full color, at the moment millions of players get stuck in the same vast game, sells like the game itself. Brady honed its product into the next century, the same history notes, but no later Brady title quite topped FFVII.