In 2024, the president of MM manufacturing company "Serano Genomics" was kidnapped. At the ransom handover scene, the perpetrator managed to escape, leaving behind footage on all surveillance records where his face was covered with an image of a laughing man logo. Six years after the incident, the Laughing Man's ingenious traps resurface in the network society... The long-sealed Laughing Man awakens, and the ultimate showdown between the top-tier hacker and Section 9 is about to begin! In 2005, an episode depicting the "Laughing Man Incident" was compiled into a 160-minute feature titled *Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex The Laughing Man*, which was released on DVD. The combined cumulative shipments of DVDs and videos for this work and its sequel, *S.A.C. 2nd GIG*, reached 1.5 million copies.