Sadly it was just sordid tales at Sony, and Sony's XX years parties.
When I joined I was a Nintendo man ( still am ) and was working "for the enemy" I was also in the UK. Nintendo are not popular in the UK/Eurozone, and the company I was at use to make Nintendo games. So whenever I would say "the N word", I would get some angry sentiment which would usually entail, the VHS from start to finish for QA, bad documentation oh and having to order a million carts upfront.
Thinking about it now though, they might be referring to $1 million rather than 1 million actual units. To which if the cart costs $40 to make that is only 25,000 carts. $30
1 to make, 33,333 carts. $20 is 50,000 Given the costs of Mask Rom tooling, board and label printing etc it doesn't seem unreasonable, kind of seems low.. Then if the order is NTSC and PAL versions then that is 2 sets of mask ROMS, multiple labels and half the units each territory, so imagine you have the cheap carts $20, you get 12,500 NTSC and 12,500 PAL for $1 million yeah ouch...
I mean compared to PSX's $2 per unit, its a
lot more
Given we almost didn't get a wonder boy II because I was a so so game that only sold 3 million copies ( see The Untold History of Japanese Game Development 2 ) maybe even having 1 million carts to be worth it(again that could only be 500,000 per NTSC/PAL ), isn't that insane either...
1.
https://archive.org/stream/NextGeneration24Dec1996/Next_Generation_24_Dec_1996#page/n75/mode/2up