The Hallelujah Game

A miracle! Wii has been steadily sinking in Japan like a boat being pressed down into the rushing waters of disinterest. But one lone game is pushing the boat back up and draining the water out.

Wii – 142,000

Super Mario Bros. 5 – 465,000

This is very good for second week of sales. Strike up the choir!

People are stunned how Mario 5 is selling hardware. Who are these people who are buying hardware because of the arrival of a classic Mario game? They are me. I bought a DS, after over fifteen years of not buying any consoles, solely for NSMB DS. If Nintendo puts out a classic Mario on all their future hardware, I will buy every Nintendo hardware. Classic Mario is too irresistible.

If Nintendo does things correctly with Zelda, they could pull off an entertainment phenomenon we haven’t seen since Ocarina. Zelda is dominated more by disinterest at the moment.

But let us look at this handy dandy chart.

NSMB sales had to have been like a wake-up bat swung at the Nintendo executives’ heads. Just compare its sales to Super Mario Galaxy. Galaxy hasn’t even reached one million in Japan! Mario 5 passed Sunshine’s total sales within one week. Galaxy was surpassed in two weeks.

I do not know how big Mario 5 will go. I don’t think it will catch up to the DS game. And I do not know how long Mario 5 will be popping up the hardware. But I do know that it cannot be denied that Mario 5 is a killer app in Japan. And Iwata has been desperately searching for Wii killer apps.

Mario 5’s triumphant sales means we will see Mario 6 come out in 2027 of eighteen years from now. Hey, Nintendo did this after Super Mario World. Why not with Mario 5? Super Mario World sold SNES hardware too. But it still got abandoned.

So expect Super Mario Bros. 6 in 2027. I will put it on my calender next to the Kid Icarus sequel that took forty years to make.