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Saturday, December 4th 1999 at 12:00AM

This Christmas, Giant aim to capitalise on their link-up with the No Fear Downhill mountain biking game for the Playstation

Demo-ed at Bike 99 earlier this year but only officially launched on November 19th, the Codemaster-developed downhilling game features Giant bikes and race banners in a fast and furious collection of solo and dual slalom runs from around the world.

500 000 copies of the game are expected to be sold in the next few months, especially in the run up to Christmas. A common complaint from any leisure retailer not connected with the computer games industry is that Playstation and other computer gaming systems suck sales away. Giant want to reverse that trend a little by offering their stockists the chance to increase footfall by using Codemasters swing tickets on in-store bikes, placing a you should be behind bars poster in the window and linking up with a computer games store to cross-promote bikes and the computer game.

A case of sleeping with the enemy? Ian Beasant thinks so, but its good for business:

Computer games and computer stores are one of our major competitors for Christmas trade [so were suggesting to stockists that they should] go down to their local computer store, offer to put a Giant bike in their shop window with [their] shop details to help promote the game and offer them the opportunity to put promotional material in [their] shop window. Cross promote, its free and sells more product.

NB The poster features the digital MTBers eye-view of a suicidal downhill. So far so good but look closer, does the stem really connect straight to the suspension forks? One steerer tube short of a Y-frame perhaps?