Did you know that the last time Nintendo was on top with hardware sales for both consoles and portables was 1994? That's right, 13 years ago, when the Super Nintendo and GameBoy controlled the market. Now it's 2007, and both the Wii and DS are on top.

The Wii has had an outstanding 9 months on the market, selling over 10.5 million consoles. On the portable side, the DS continues to plow through the competition. It has sold almost 50 million since it's launch in November 2004. Nintendo really is king of the hill once again.

Nine. It’s a simple number. But that’s all it took apparently. In nine short months the underdog of the video game industry - the oldest and most in tack of them all - managed somehow to sell over 10 million video game consoles to quickly and gracefully steal the lead from competition that had the market to itself for 12 months prior. It is perhaps the greatest upset of the industry in years if not decades. Not since the split of Atari and Activision has there been such unexpected success for a brand new idea. And this happened with all three machines on the market for that whole nine months.

Nintendo, with their ‘never die’ attitude and resourceful development teams whom are always keen to try new ideas changed things in such a dramatic way. We’d seen the addition of multiple audio channels, new dimensions and beefed up graphics. And even though we had also seen improvements to controllers with the addition of analogue inputs, nothing had been this dramatic. A two piece controller with ‘unconventional’ motion sensing capabilities, not better, high definition graphics, has achieved this ‘paradigm’ shift in interactive entertainment,- and leadership. With the handheld market mimicking the home console arena in the way the PSP upped the graphics, the Nintendo DS, with its ‘all new way to play’ was the scout. It was a test, a test to gauge the reaction to such ‘unconventional’ ways to play. And its success, nearly 50 million machines in almost three years, has paved the way for the road Wii is set to follow.

Dio via aussie-nintendo.com »