Nintendo announced earlier this week that the company kicked off the holiday shopping season with a bang, having seen record-setting sales of its Wii and multiple game titles. Nintendo sold more than 500,000 Wii consoles on Black Friday 2011 alone, making it the console’s biggest Black Friday ever. The company’s newest addition to the Zelda franchise, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, sold 535,000 copies since launching on November 20th to become the fastest-selling Zelda game of all time. Super Mario 3D Land, the first 3D Mario game for the Nintendo 3DS, sold more than 500,000 in two weeks, making it the fastest-selling Mario game of all time. Read on for more.
“What this has been able to do is drive our Nintendo 3DS business in only eight months to surpass the full first year volume of the original DS and we still have the bulk of the holiday to go, and we still have the launch of Mario Kart 7 (out Sunday, Dec. 4) to continue driving our full-year sales on Nintendo 3DS,” Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said in a statement, noting that last week’s 3DS console sales were up 325% over the week prior.
“We know that Black Friday and that entire week is a key selling week and it is important for products like ours to have a jump in momentum and we were fortunate to see that,” Fils-Aime added. “For us, it really was driven by unique and powerful software and what gives us confidence is that we still have more software to launch in the balance of this holiday period.”