Although specific sales results from the U.S. are unlikely until the usual NPD monthly data next month, Nintendo Canada has revealed the top five selling Wii games in their own territory.
Unsurprisingly, the best selling game was
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, with some Canadian retailers reporting an almost 1:1 hardware to software sales ratio for the game. The second best selling game was Ubisoft’s exclusive title
Red Steel and, in third place, Activision’s WWII shoot ‘em-up
Call of Duty 3. Sega’s exclusive
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz was the fourth best selling and Bandai Namco’s PlayStation 2 port
Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 was number five.
In an
interview with Canadian website Globeandmail.com, Nintendo Canada market director Pierre-Paul Trepanier indicates that the country saw a 100 percent sell out of the console during it’s launch on November 19th. "We're struggling to try and find a solution to a situation in which demand has far outstripped supply," said Trepanier. "The expectation was that within a few days Nintendo would still be stock everywhere."
According to Trepanier, every region in North America has been demanding more hardware, with additional nunchuck controllers apparently in particularly short demand in the Atlanta region. "We wanted that to happen eventually, but we haven't even kicked in our TV advertising yet," said Trepanier. "We purposely held back on TV advertising so that we wouldn't be advertising a product that you couldn't find in stores.”
Although no figures were given, Trepanier also described interest in the Wii’s virtual console as generating “higher than expected traffic". The retro download service saw two TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine titles –
Bomberman 93 and
Bonk’s Adventure - added to its roster today, after the format went unrepresented in the launch weekend line-up.
