Nintendo DS now 100 million strong

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 12 March 2009 08:55

Your IT - Entertainment

The 100 millionth Nintendo DS system has been shipped. That's quite a milestone.

It's taken less than five years and three generations for DS sales to reach the 100 million mark.

The original model was originally released in late 2004, followed by the DS Lite in mid-2006.

The latest generation - the DSi - went on sale in Japan in November 2008 and will arrive in Europe, North America and Australia in the next few weeks.

In keeping with the times, the DSi includes two cameras and has the ability to record, manipulate and play sound files.

According to NPD figures, Nintendo narrowly missed selling 10 million DS systems during 2008 in the US alone. This represented 72 percent of all portable game system sales.

The Nintendo Wii was the only game system to sell more units in the US last year, racking up 10.17 million.

A successful platform needs successful software. Nintendo claims 83 DS games have seen worldwide shipments of at least one million units, with seven of them exceeding 10 million units.

Although Nintendo didn't identify those top selling games, it implied that the list includes Nintendogs, Brain Age, New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart. It would be surprising if there wasn't a Pokemon title in there too.