Last year Pokemon Diamond & Pearl the Movie: Giratina and the Sky’s Bouqeut: Shaymin was able to garner a whopping 2,384,198 tickets in advance sales. That truly is impressive, especially for an animated movie, and the Guinness World Records has recognized this to be the most advance ticket sales of an anime movie.

You might be wondering why this movie had such a high pre-sale rate. Could this be the best Pokemon movie to ever be created in the history of mankind? Not exactly. People who brought their Nintendo DS and Pokemon Diamond/Pearl to the theater and preordered their tickets were able to download a level 100 Pokemon named Regigigas. And those who went to watch the movie, regardless if they preordered or not, received a level 50 Shaymin. These Pokemon were able to unlock certain secret events in the Plantinum edition of the Pokemon game.

So people may not have preordered the tickets just to watch the movie but hey, it’s a good marketing technique. Not only did this technique work to make money from the movie, it also gave a world record to the movie. I say they did a pretty good job.

Long live Pokemon!