With sales of New Super Mario Bros already reported to be 480,000 on the first day, it is not surprising to find the new Nintendo DS title at the top of the Japanese sales charts this week, with 899,518 copies sold in its first four days. This meant that the long-awaited first party title essentially sold out all of the 900,000 units available in the first week.
Although the total is still below that of major role-playing series such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy – which regularly sell over one or even two million copies in their first week - New Super Mario Bros. is expected to show the same chart longevity as other Nintendo DS titles, putting it well on course to be come the format’s biggest selling title so far.
Sales for other new releases this week appeared dwarfed in comparison, although Square Enix’s portable version of board game spin-off Itadaki Street performed well for a PSP title with 48,342 unit sales. Dating sim KimiKiss from Enterbrain (publishers of Famitsu magazine) also did relatively well, with 42,127 units sold.
As expected, sales of the Nintendo DS rose sharply with the release of New Super Mario Bros., for a total of 289,151 (including 4,126 units of the original version of the hardware). PSP sales rose slightly to 27,227 units, with the PlayStation 2 on 19,798 and the Game Boy Advance family of consoles at 8,709, the Xbox 360 at 1,242, and the GameCube on 1,116.
