Tendo City

Quote:REDMOND, Wash.--April 4, 2003--Riding the crest of three hit product launches, Nintendo of America Inc. currently claims the best selling console game, the best selling portable games, and the best selling hardware system in America.

Since coming to market within a week of each other in late March, The Legend of Zelda®: The Wind Waker™ for Nintendo GameCube™, Pokemon® Ruby Version and Pokemon® Sapphire Version for Game Boy® Advance, and the new flip-top, front-lit Game Boy® Advance SP portable system have leaped to the top of their respective sales charts.

The new Zelda game set a Nintendo record with more than 600,000 copies pre-sold to consumers before its March 24 launch date, and retailers now are quickly burning through the entire initial North American shipment of 1.1 million games. In the same period, sales rates for Nintendo GameCube hardware have jumped 20 percent.

With more than 4.4 million copies of Pokemon already shipped in Japan, more than 2.2 million games have now moved through to North American retailers, showing conclusively Pokemon is back with an exclamation point. The companion Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire titles have dominated portable software since their launch on March 17.

Finally, 800,000 Game Boy Advance SP units have blown through to North American retail, matching equally raucous receptions in Japan and Europe.

"While no one will know the champion of this season's college basketball tournament until next week, the winner of this spring's video game tournament is Nintendo," says Peter MacDougall, executive vice president, sales and marketing, Nintendo of America Inc. "Game Boy Advance SP, Zelda and Pokemon represent a three point play that players and retailers dream about."

"At what is traditionally a slow time of the year for video games, Nintendo has seized the sales initiative," says Richard Simone, video game buyer, Toys "R" Us. "With their blockbuster products Game Boy Advance SP, The Legend of Zelda and Pokemon, they're a big part of why video games are one of the truly bright spots at retail."

As the worldwide leader and innovator in the creation of interactive entertainment, Nintendo Co., Ltd. of Kyoto, Japan, manufactures and markets hardware and software for its popular home video game systems. The systems include Game Boy®, Nintendo® 64, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo GameCube. Since the release of its first home video game system in 1983, Nintendo has sold more than 1.6 billion video games worldwide, creating enduring industry icons such as Mario™ and Donkey Kong® and launching such franchises as Zelda™ and Pokemon®. As a wholly owned subsidiary, Nintendo of America Inc., based in Redmond, Wash., serves as headquarters for Nintendo's operations in the Western Hemisphere.

For more information about Nintendo visit the company's Web site, http://www.nintendo.com.

Who is it exactly you are quoting, exactly? The only link is to Nintendo.com, suggesting they are the ones saying this. That being the case, pfft :D.

Planet GameCube.

Apologies.

DJ: The press release is on every big site, but it is from Nintendo. And of course they were purposefully vague and completely avoided actual sales numbers for both Zelda and Pokémon, but it could just be that they don't have exact numbers yet. We'll know more when the TRST data is out.

Ah, good to know. Oh, and I have to say I HATE it when people make sports analogies. I have no idea what 3 point play means! Stop doing that, schools, companies, and government officials! I think a really sickening comparison is a teacher who compaired football to roman soldiers. Um, soldiers are a noble lot who fight and die for what they believe in. Football players are people who get payed to play games all day (and unnecesarily dangerous ones at that). No comparison can rightly be drawn!

Sorry, rant mode off...

Sounds pretty good for Nintendo, although we won't know how good till we see the sales chart for March.

Football players are people who get payed to play games all day (and unnecesarily dangerous ones at that).


I so agree. Sports players paid millions to play games for a living, and on top of that they're worshiped by mindless assholes. The 53+ dead in Iraq are heros, and underpaid ones at that.

My, that IS good news...perhaps the boost of GC hardware will also lead to a boost of software amongst other titles as well. Zelda never seems to fail Nintendo...it's just a shame that they always wind up having to use it as a last card.