The Shrine

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>It's all but official: Mario Party 4 will outsell Celda in Japan....by about 100,000 copies</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Zelda for some reason usually sell alright in Japan, but in North America it always outsells it several times over. (Ocarina of Time sold 7 times more in NA than J, and presales of WW are approaching total Japanese sales)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I'm not in Japan</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Maybe not, but the question is: why?</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Crazy. Then again, Mario Kart for GameCube could sell like a monster if they push it right.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Because he lives in Ontario. :)</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Not enough tentacles, I guess.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Yeah, but man, with Sunshine and Zelda not selling very well, Nintendo just lost what used to be two POWERHOUSE franchises in Japan</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Approx 6 miles from me, but that wasn't the direction my question was going.... :-)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Smash Brothers outsold both of them combined.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Winning Eleven and Kirby are up there too, at over 500K a piece. I am not sure what Mario sold, it's fallen off the charts.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Mario was right around 700K. Zelda will be off the charts soon. Those are disappointing numbers for those franchises. Pikmin sold over 500K</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Funniest thing here at the Shrine in a long time =P</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>So, what are good numbers, then? Perhaps it was when Zelda 3 stayed number #1 for 3 months or so? Perhaps that's saying that Z3 was the best one?</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>For Mario maybe, but Zelda has never had amazing sales in Japan (except for Ocarina of Time which sold over a million in a period of weeks).</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Heh, I didn't think it was that funny, but I'll go along with that if you insist. :)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>ROFLAO, that was a great comeback Ganath and entirely accurate.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>By comparison, OoT sold about 1.5mil and Mario 64 like 2 mil in Japan. You would hope you'd get 1 mil of each at least, especially since Smash Bros hit that and Mario Party 4 is over 700k</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>You can't measure a games sales success based completely on sales in the first few weeks. Especially this early in the systems cycle. Remember GE007 after two months had only sold a few hundred thousand, a few years later it had become one of the highest selling videogames in history.

Also, keep in mind that Ocarina of Time was released to a larger userbase at a much later time in the consoles lifetime. After 8 weeks it hadn't sold much better than Wind Waker has now. Ocarina of Time also had the largest promotional campaign of any video game in history backing it. Ocarina of Time was also the fastest selling game in the history of videogaming, no game has come close to selling 7 million copies world wide in 6 weeks. Wind Waker is currently the second place title overall on the console charts only behind Mario Party, I don't think that's bad at all, especially since its got quite a distance on it in comparisson to other titles.

I don't remember Mario 64's sales, but I can make a good guess on the reason for Mario Sunshine's bad sales. The difficulty was too hard, there were a ton of complaints about that. It's actually one of the most difficult mainstream series titles to come out of Japan (just compare it to other high sellers, older Mario games, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, etc..).</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>There are what, 2 1/2 million GCs in Japan, only 600K sold. 25% ratio sucks.....especially when you consider SSBM sold more than twice that there and Pikmin, and unknown franchise, sold less than 100K less. Also, Celda was selling at a discount for a while...</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It's still selling copies. I guarantee you it will sell quite a bit more than 600K after another 3 years.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>It's dropped to like 30th and keeps going down. 650k at best</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I don't know, Ocarina of Time sold 6-700K more after its first 3 months of sales, I am sure the new Zelda can do that. Mario 64 only sold around 800K after its first year in Japan.</div>